November 05, 1998

Elusive clues deepen Hakim Said's murder mystery

News Intelligence Unit

By Kamran Khan

KARACHI: The government's much-heralded claim that it had solved the murder mystery of Hakim Muhammad Said is losing ground in the face of investigators' apparent failure in gathering solid legal evidence that may sustain the government's allegations in any court of law. This was discovered in the News Intelligence Unit (NIU) examination of police probe into the Hakim Said murder case.

Senior officials with full knowledge of police probe into Hakim Said's coldblooded murder on October 17, unhesitatingly acknowledged in their background interviews with the NIU that after more than a fortnight of investigation, the murder puzzle appeared more complicated with growing fear that this case might soon join the long list of Pakistan's most dramatic unresolved murder mysteries.

Not surprisingly, the Karachi police have not reported even an inch of progress to the federal government or to Sindh Governor Moinuddin Haider in their investigation of Hakim Said murder case, since the federal government decided to impose governor's rule in the province on October 29.

The NIU investigation, during which several relevant officials were interviewed and related documents and material were examined, suggested that some key elements of Hakim Said murder probe might not to be placed before Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif before he made the sensational disclosures about the case during his October 27 press conference in Karachi.

A federal minister confirmed this to the NIU on Monday that the prime minister was not aware that the Karachi police were yet to make any arrest in the Hakim Said murder case, despite a categorical statement from the premier about the perpetrators and executioners of Hakim Said murder plot more than a week ago.

"My understanding is that the prime minister was just provided the macro-level details and information that led him to believe, like most Karachiites, that the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) was involved in Hakim Said's murder and other acts of terrorism and he decided to throw a challenge to terrorists of all shades and colour in the nation's business capital," the federal minister said.

Until Wednesday morning, the alleged MQM terrorist Aamirullah who, according to the prime minister, had allegedly confessed to his involvement in Hakim Said's murder and had provided graphic details about his organisation's role in the assassination, had not been arrested in that particular case.

Aamirullah was arrested on October 19 while his role in Hakim Said's murder was exposed by the prime minister on October 28. "Legally Aamirullah was not involved in Hakim Said's murder case when the prime minister made the statement about his involvement. Strictly speaking on legal lines, he was not found involved even one week after that statement was made by the prime minister," disclosed a senior official source.

The federal cabinet source said that his impression was that the premier was not told that Aamirullah's confessional statement, that was shown to Nawaz Sharif in Karachi and to the federal cabinet on October 30, another, though conflicting, version of -- unpublicised -- confessional video statement of the same accused was available with the provincial and federal investigators.

The first version was recorded by a select group of Karachi police officials soon after Aamirullah's arrest, while the other recording had been made much later by the nine-member Joint Investigation Team (JIT), comprising all federal and provincial security services.

The prime minister was, however, not aware that both video confessional statements of Aamirullah contradicted each other on various key issues. In the confessional statement recorded before the JIT, at one point, Aamirullah showed visible signs of nervous breakdown when he stood up before the camera and while holding the Holy Quraan in both hands he swore to have no knowledge about the Hakim Said murder case.

In the earlier part of the same version of the video confessional statement before the JIT, Aamirullah though had confessed to his involvement in Hakim Said's murder, but he baffled his investigators by giving adifferent sequence of events that contrasted his earlier confessional statement before a select group of Karachi police officials.

Officials, who dispute the veracity of his confessional statement, said that Aamirullah's controversial claim that he and four other terrorists had alighted from the coaster and had fired upon Hakim Said with automatic rifles from a close distance didn't, however, match the evidence collected from the ground.

The police investigators had recovered only four empties from the ground, while 26 similar empties had been recovered from inside the abandoned vehicle, whose shattered window glass clearly indicated that vollies of bullets had been fired at Hakim Said from inside the vehicle.

The NIU understands that the prime minister is also not aware that the JIT that had interrogated Aamirullah for several days was sharply divided over his definite role in the Hakim Said murder case. In their final report, five out of nine members of the JIT thought Aamirullah might not be involved in Hakim Said's murder, the other four members who represented the federal agencies in the JIT thought that Aamirullah was directly involved in the case.

Using the security jargon, five JIT members described Aamirullah as 'grey', while the remaining four thought that he was a 'black'. No JIT member, however, cleared Aamirullah as 'white'. A federal investigator, while responding to the NIU questions, said that overwhelming evidence and witnesses were available to suggest that since being snatched at gunpoint, the 16-seater vehicle used in the murder of Hakim Said remained in the use of MQM militants belonging to its Liaquatabad unit.

"People from that particular Liaquatabad neighbourhood have come forward to report that the 16-seater vehicle was regularly seen driven by MQM militants of the area," he said. The federal investigator said that several witnesses had reported that the same vehicle was seen carrying MQM followers to various educational institutions in Karachi.

The vehicle, belonging to Gul Ahmad Power Company and used in Hakim Said's murder, had been snatched at gunpoint while picking up staff from Liaquatabad in March this year. After being abandoned in downtown Karachi soon after Hakim Said's murder on October 17, the police had seized three documents from its dashboard.

Federal investigators said that the three documents recovered from the stolen vehicle led them to Dr Asim, a member of MQM Medical Aid Committee, and to Qazi Khalid, a renowned MQM MPA, and ultimately to Aamirullah. Officials acknowledged that Dr Asim was detained and subsequently released for lack of evidence and for that reason alone the investigators decided not to detain or question Qazi Khalid.

Regarding contradictory statements of Aamirullah before the police and the JIT, federal investigators claimed that they believed he had made accurate statement before the police team because the changes Aamirullah made in his original statement regarding his activities on the previous day and on the morning of October 17 were contradicted by his homemates.

Federal investigators said that in both statements Amirullah refused to give any believable account of his activities between 11:00 pm on October 16 and 11:00 am on October 17. While retracting his first confession before the select group of Karachi police officials, Amirullah had said that he had spent the October 16 night watching an Indian movie called 'Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejayenge' and on October 17 morning he had taken his cousin for a job interview with the Aero Asia, where he had read the news of Hakim Said's murder in a newspaper special supplement.

In an event that sharply illustrates tremendous contradiction of opinion even amongst the police investigators, the District South police -- who were supposed to investigate the Hakim Said murder case -- refused to restrict their investigation to the clue provided by a select group of District Central police officials, resulting in an unprecedented federal decision to shift the Hakim Said murder investigation from District South to District Central police. Ramzan Channa, a widely regarded police official, who was the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) for District South, is understood to have officially informed the Inspector General of Police (IGP) that he was not fully convinced with Aamirullah's alleged confessional statement and he thought it would drastically limit the scope of police investigation of this complicated case.

The NIU has learnt on authority that SSP Channa in his conclusion received across the board support from other superiors, including Chief Minister Liaquat Jatoi, who thought that the government and more precisely the prime minister must not commit themselves to the hastily drawn investigation and it would grossly jeopardise the government's legal position in the case.

Interestingly, Aamirullah though admitted then denied his involvement in the Hakim Said murder case, but at no point refuted his participation in several other cases of terrorism. He provided graphic details about other acts of terrorism that he had committed allegedly with full knowledge of several central MQM leaders. On the basis of his knowledge about other alleged MQM militants, Aamirullah guessed before the JIT that the deserted Karachi police ASI and a notorious MQM militant -- ASI Naushad Ali -- might have killed Hakim Said.

Officials, who tend to believe Aamirullah's non-involvement statement in the Hakim Said case, relate that to the forensic evidence collected so far from the scene of crime and also from the weapons recovered from a botched up police raid at an alleged MQM hideout at Apsra Apartments. Forensic experts have reported that Aamirullah's fingerprints do not match the prints collected from the vehicle used in the murder.

Neither the weapons seized from the suspected MQM hideout nor the fingerprints collected from those seized weapons matched those in Hakim Said's murder. "Forensic reports and conflicting statements from Aamirullah barred us from jumping to conclusion in this important murder case," said a ranking official, who thought that Aamirullah's statement was too weak to build a case against the third largest political party in the country. Federal investigators though responded cautiously about Aamirullah's direct involvement in the Hakim Said murder case, but they thought that Aamirullah's arrest and his undisputed confessions about his involvement in seven separate murder cases and in setting ablaze dozens of vehicles during the MQM's call for strike last month broadly highlighted the basic character of the party.

The investigators, who believed that the MQM was directly responsible for Hakim Said's murder, said that the organisation had publicly owned alleged terrorists such as Aamirullah and Fasihuddin alias Jugno and had demanded their urgent release. The federal investigators said that the MQM was forced to own Aamirullah because initially they had thought that he had been abducted by Haqiqi elements in District Central.

One federal investigator argued that: "Since the MQM had lodged a proper report with the District Central police and also with the Police Control about Aamirullah's suspicious disappearance, they had already owned him as an active worker."

But officials, who thought that it was too early to jump to conclusion, said that for a hardcore terrorist it was most stupid to attend wedding and get arrested despite the fact that an Urdu newspaper had already exposed his organisation's role in Hakim Said's murder case. In a swift operation, the plain-cloth policemen had pickup Aamirullah from outside a crowded wedding hall in Federal B Area. However, there was disparity in the official record about the date of his disappearance as reported by the MQM and the date of his official arrest as shown by the police.

While some investigators guessed that the MQM might have considered Hakim Said as an alternative Mohajir leader, the actual motives behind the murder remained unclear. Police or federal investigators have not been able to gather any evidence that might show some tension between Hakim Said and the MQM leadership in Karachi, though in private meeting Hakim Said was known as a staunch critic of activities of the MQM's non-political wings.

While the police investigation into the murder of one of Pakistan's most illustrious sons appeared all the more confused and direction-less, a DIG has jumped 75 officers to become the chief of Sindh Police, while another SSP has superceded about 100 officers to assume the charge of the chief of Karachi police. His subordinate DSPs have become the SSPs and their subordinate inspectors have become the DSPs. The extraordinary and most unprecedented promotions have been showered for solving a murder case in which not a single arrest had been made and whose fate in any court of law looked most uncertain, to say the least.