Reporting Pakistan

by Meena Menon

  I foolishly thought the trial would be on similar lines and open to the press in Pakistan. It was high security all right, but no one was allowed to attend the proceedings, and from the ATC it moved to Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi. In addition, public prosecutors were under threat. The ATC in the district court complex had none of the security trappings of our own court. In May 2013, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, the earlier Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) special public prosecutor, was shot dead in his car while on his way to Rawalpindi. The new FIA special prosecutor, Chaudhry Muhammed Azhar, a grey-haired man, was friendly on the phone and said I could meet him on the date of the next hearing. I arrived at the district court complex before 9 a.m. to wait for him and he wandered in accompanied by some casual-looking security guards in blue who didn’t stop me as I went up to him. We spoke briefly and he said I couldn’t attend the hearing since the media wasn’t allowed. I later went up the stairs to see the small, wooden furnished court which was empty. He was helpful and after every hearing, I would call him for updates. There was no media buzz and no one even knew him at the court, unlike our own Nikam.

  There were fresh delays in the trial after the court rejected the findings of the Pakistan Judicial Commission following its visit to Mumbai in 2011 since it was denied permission to cross-examine four witnesses. In September 2013, the Pakistan Judicial Commission visited India for more interviews with witnesses and officials in Mumbai, and they came back ‘highly satisfied’. Their initial dates for travel were changed twice and there was much speculation in the media that India wasn’t giving them visas—which was not true. We tried in vain to dispel this myth, and eventually the commission did travel and get its work done. This time the commission could cross-examine two witnesses, a doctor who carried out the postmortems of the nine terrorists who had been killed in the attack and the investigating officer of the case, Ramesh Mahale. In 2012, the ATC judge had rejected the report of the commission since he couldn’t cross-examine some witnesses or meet the two doctors who had conducted the postmortems of the nine dead terrorists.

  India has been demanding a speedy trial in the case and says it has sent all the relevant evidence to Pakistan. Talks between the two countries ceased after this attack. While I was there, the trial was coming up with more and more evidence but suddenly the defence lawyers were changed, and Rizwan Abbasi and his team were presented to the media at a flashy press conference coordinated by an event management agency.

  On the fifth anniversary of the Mumbai terror attacks, 26 November 2013, the new defence team addressed a press conference on the case. Abbasi would now represent the seven accused in the case, including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. He felt the case was already prolonged and he would approach the high court for expediting the trial, and he said that India had delayed matters by not submitting proper evidence. Invitations for the press conference were also sent out by the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a front organization for the LeT. The event was managed by a public relations firm, Aye Tee, and had large banners raising ten questions on the Mumbai attacks which had not been answered by India.

  Abbasi said no concrete evidence had been provided against any of the seven accused in jail. He said Indian courts did not allow the Pakistan Judicial Commission to meet or cross-examine Kasab or question his confession which had been retracted. His clients were in jail based on that single confessional statement and it was not tenable in law since it was not subjected to a cross-examination by the defence, Abbasi said. In addition, there was no proof that the handlers whom Kasab had named were from Pakistan and neither was this substantiated by phone call records. India, apparently, did not provide timely evidence and only sent dossiers which are not admissible in a court of law. Dossiers are just information, not evidence, he remarked. He said that evidence of photographs of Kasab or supporting statements relating to it were not sent to Pakistan. It was not possible for ten people to just walk into a city and conduct a terror strike, he added. (All of us thought that, but it was evidently possible.)

  While reporting, whenever I called, Abbasi was forthcoming and even helpful at times, though he wouldn’t give away anything specific, and the media didn’t always report proceedings since the trial was being conducted at the Adiala Jail where Lakhvi and six others were housed.

  Before that, in mid-November 2013, the defence lawyer for Lakhvi dropped out of the case, citing personal reasons. Riaz Akram Cheema told me that he had taken a decision that from 13 November 2013, he was no longer concerned with the case and did not wish to continue defending Lakhvi and the two other accused. He cited personal reasons, mainly that his mother was suffering from blood cancer and he wished to devote more time to her care. Cheema was the defence lawyer right from 2009 when the case was filed. He had earlier assisted defence lawyers Khwaja Sultan Ahmed and later Khwaja Harris Ahmed who had also stopped appearing in the case four months before. Cheema’s assistant, Fakr Hayat Awan, was asked to discontinue when the Pakistan Judicial Commission returned after its second visit to Mumbai in September 2013.

  On the other hand, Chaudhry Azhar brimmed with confidence. There was enough evidence in the case and some new witnesses were to be produced soon, he said. Among the witnesses were those who had obtained deep-sea fishing licences for the boats used by the ten terrorists to sail to India. Two witnesses, Saifullah and Omar Daraz, fishing harbour contractors who ran a company that procured licences for boats and also provided crew, gave evidence. Two boats, Al Hussaini and Al Fouz, had been licensed from the company for the attacks. Saifullah was the accountant for the company and Daraz the owner. They got the papers for the boats in question from the competent authority. More than thirty-two witnesses were examined at that time and more had been summoned. There are over 100 witnesses in the trial which began in February 2009.

  For four weeks after the suicide attack on the Islamabad district and sessions court on 3 March 2014, the trial of the seven accused in the Mumbai terror strike was held up. It was then heard in the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, and security concerns were voiced by the judge, Atiq-ur-Rehman. Abbasi made an application to the law secretary to enhance security at the jail since the accused could not be transported outside. Later, the ATC was shifted to sector G-11 in Islamabad, and Abbasi moved an application for the accused to be exempted from appearance. The ATC used to hear the matter every week. The prosecution had earlier said there were several witnesses left to be examined and they also had a list of some people whose testimony had to be recorded. The accused were LeT operations head Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi (who has been out on bail since April 2015)—named by Kasab in his confession as Zaki uncle—Abdul Wajid, Mazhar Iqbal, Hammad Amin Sadiq, Shahid Jameel Riaz, Jamil Ahmed and Younus Anjum.

  Three of the ten terrorists who attacked Mumbai are believed to be from Okara, including Kasab. The district electoral officer from Okara provided evidence from the voters’ list that linked one of the terrorists who was killed in the attack, to his family in Pakistan. Just before I left, there was an interesting development. One of the prosecution witnesses, a teacher, in May 2014, when cross-examined, said that Kasab studied in the Okara municipal primary school. But he was not the one hanged in Pune’s Yerawada Jail. The teacher seemed to have turned hostile during the cross-examination. There was some confusion about this whole testimony and it all seemed fishy. The prosecution could declare the witness hostile and had asked permission to re-examine him, but wasn’t confident of being allowed to do so. I don’t know what happened to this witness.

  Also interesting were some bank transactions which came to light. A bank manager from ‘Azad’ Jammu and Kashmir was cross-examined in connection with this. Some money had been transferred to the account of an accused in Karachi, ostensibly for the operation. The manager of the Muslim Commercial Bank in Islamabad was cross-examined. He had testified earlier that a sum of PKR 200,000 was transferred to the account of Hammad Amin Sadiq, an accused in the case. A police inspector, Mohammed Ashraf, was also cross-examined by the defence. Ashraf was the person who was
present at the time of the arrest of four of the seven accused in the case and also responsible for the recovery of some material from them. While I was getting all this information, I was shocked when in January 2014, Chaudhry Azhar who had always been so gracious, suddenly asked me to stop calling him. He said my reports were getting him into trouble. I had only quoted him with his permission, but there was a sudden cooling off. I realized that the government probably didn’t want much news of the trial going out, and also did not like that an Indian was reporting it, though Pakistani journalists did report on it sporadically. Even the national security adviser, Sartaj Aziz, when I asked him about the trial, was on the defensive and said that he didn’t consider Hafiz Saeed to be an offender and in fact, the courts had cleared him. On India’s demand that Pakistan take action or hand over some of the alleged masterminds of the Mumbai attacks, including Hafiz Saeed, Aziz said that was ruled out. Belatedly, Saeed has been placed under house arrest in January 2017 and charged under the Anti-terrorism Act. It remains to be seen if the case will be taken to its logical end.31 India has asked for a reinvestigation of the case and for Saeed to be tried for the attack. This was in response to Pakistan’s request for recording the statement of twenty-four witnesses in the trial in India.32

  India complains that Pakistan has been doing too little to bring the culprits to book, and the latter often retaliated by raising the Samjhauta Express blasts case and saying India wasn’t sharing information. In any case, the trial lacked any transparency, though Chaudhry Azhar said there was enough proof and new eyewitnesses, and was confident of a favourable verdict. In April 2015, the Islamabad High Court set a two-month deadline for the completion of the trial. Little has happened in the last seventeen hearings (till March 2017), going by news reports, and the trial seems to be going on forever with repeated adjournments and laments that India hadn’t given enough proof.

  III. Talking to the Taliban, Drone Strikes and Other Stories

  The tedium of talks with the Taliban

  True to form, Major General Sanaullah Khan Niazi, the general officer commanding 17 Division (Swat), spent the night before he was killed with his troops in the Bin Shai sector, perched at 10,000 feet on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. On his way back a little after noon, an improvised explosive device (IED) blew up his vehicle near Gatkotal village, Upper Dir, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Lieutenant Colonel Tauseef Ahmad and Sepoy Irfan Sattar also died in the blast. Coming a week after an all-party conference had endorsed talks (in September 2013) with the TTP which owned up to the blast, this was a prelude to disaster. The three soldiers were the latest in the form of collateral damage in Pakistan’s vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. A classmate of Maj. Gen. Niazi, Lt. Col. Shafqat Saeed, mourned his loss but said that the government should not pull back from talks, though there should be some restraint on the TTP. The government needed a plan to take the talks forward, but this wasn’t in sight. He was deeply shocked by the death of his ‘friend and good soldier’, but Maj. Gen. Niazi would not be the first army casualty since the parleys with the TTP had been announced.

  In the backdrop of terror attacks, there was a misplaced zeal about the desire to have all parties endorse a move to talk to the recalcitrant TTP. The TTP was not an outfit that believed in negotiation or talks; it was determined to set up a Sharia state in Pakistan by any means. On the whole the peace talks with the TTP were all sound and fury, signifying nothing—with people flying off to meet the TTP shura at an undisclosed destination, the confusing aspect of changing members of the committees, and the demands and counter demands; the reportage was more about all these details rather than on any substantive progress. Despite Sharif’s well-meaning intentions to end bloodshed and offer an olive branch to cold-blooded murderers, in the end the army went in for Operation Zarb-e-Azb, an offensive which scythed through terrorist hideouts in Waziristan, and displaced millions of people once again.

  The initial scepticism about the talks was reinforced by events every passing week. After the three army men’s deaths, it was the suicide bombing of the All Saints Church in Peshawar, and there were two other bombings that week. Yet the government persisted with its efforts with the TTP, and the minister for interior, Chaudhry Nisar, claimed that mediators were flying out to meet the TTP chief, Hakimullah, with a letter when he was killed in a drone strike on 1 November in North Waziristan. It did seem a little odd that the TTP chief would actually want a letter of formal invitation—anyway, he didn’t live to see it. Of course, no one in the government would confirm if it was really Hakimullah who had been killed and I finally had to rely on a reporter from Dawn who spoke to the TTP spokesperson, Shahidullah Shahid. It was frustrating to get the same non-committal replies from most government sources, and I realized that local journalists, too, were looking to the TTP’s spokesperson for details. A week later, at a dramatic press conference on a Sunday, the interior minister chose to throw a tantrum over the US strike rather than share any important details of the strike or names of those killed. He even called for cutting off all ties with the US, something which is easier said than done.

  The Dawn quoted Pakistani intelligence officials as having reported to their higher-ups that the Pakistani Taliban chief was leaving from a meeting at a mosque in the Dande Darpakhel area of North Waziristan when the drone targeted their vehicle. Five Taliban, including close aides of Hakimullah—Abdullah Bahar Mehsud and Tariq Mehsud—were killed, and two others were injured. The Dande Darpakhel area is five kilometres north of Miramshah, the main town of the North Waziristan tribal region. The ministry of foreign affairs issued the usual template condemning the US drone strike: ‘These strikes are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. There is an across the board consensus in Pakistan that these drone strikes must end.’

  Untrue reports of Mehsud’s death had appeared periodically before this, and the government was not taking a chance by confirming his death this time—at least that’s what one official source said. Hakimullah had assumed leadership of the TTP in August 2009 after the death of Baitullah Mehsud in a drone strike. He carried a reward of $5 million on his head as a most wanted terrorist. The drone strike pulverized the ongoing talks with the TTP which many were sceptical about in any case. The terror outfit which seemed to have an excellent media reach was putting it out that it was keen on the talks with the government, and while bombs were going off everywhere, it kept denying it had anything to do with those incidents, putting the blame on its factions like Jundullah.

  A BBC interview was quoted everywhere, with Hakimullah saying he was keen on talks, though no one had approached him. It seems in retrospect like an elaborate charade, with the government plodding on, keeping up the illusion of inclusion and democracy.

  Hakimullah’s death provoked disproportionate reactions from Pakistani authorities and Imran Khan’s PTI. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan vented his anger against the US, calling for a review of all ties. Imran vowed to block NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) supplies to Afghanistan from 20 November 2013 onwards. Nearly 1450 civilians had been killed in similar drone strikes, according to figures presented in the Peshawar High Court. Hakimullah was declared a martyr by right-wing groups and the government seemed to forget the huge casualties inflicted by the TTP in Pakistan.

  Soon, in December 2013, helicopter gunships bombed terrorist hideouts in North Waziristan in what was described as ‘surgical strikes’ by the interior minister. In January 2014, terrorists struck with a rocket attack on the Bannu cantonment, killing twenty, and in a market near the sacred GHQ in Rawalpindi. No one expected the government to persist with talks but in a stunning move, on 29 January 2014, Sharif appeared in the National Assembly to give peace another chance. On a day marked by another suicide attack, this time on the Rangers’ office in Karachi, instead of the much-expected green signal for a military operation, he announced a four-member committee to further the peace process, and this time it included the special assistant to the
prime minister and columnist, Irfan Siddiqui, a former ISI operative involved in Operation Midnight Jackal,33 Major (retd) Mohammed Amir, a senior journalist based in Peshawar, Rahimullah Yusufzai, and Rustom Shah Mohmand, former Pakistan ambassador to Kabul, who was nominated by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government, and who was part of the first committee as well. The ISI, excluded from the earlier committee, muscled in on this one. Mohmand, whom I met a few times, was optimistic for a while. The TTP was willing to negotiate within the ambit of the Constitution; it was not insisting on the enforcement of the Sharia and it had called for a ceasefire, to which the government, too, had responded. These were positive achievements and the committee felt the government would have to have a new group of people from the army, the ministry of interior and other agencies who would take the dialogue process decisively forward—which is why another committee with bureaucrats was formed in March 2014.