Re: Killings in Police encounters: Right way of justice?
A report in Guardian, right in time:
Pakistan police take harsh justice to the streets: ‘Mostly we get the right people’
**Death by police encounter is on the rise in Karachi as officers attempt to crack down on gangs and Taliban-affiliated terrorists
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Police officers patrol the streets of Karachi. Photograph: Zainal Abd Halim /Reuters**Jon Boone in Karachi**
Monday 17 November 2014 18.27 EST
**Stories about cornered criminals coming to sticky ends in shootouts with police are so routine in Pakistan that newspapers rarely bother with more than the few sentences that recorded the death of Mutabar Khan.
The 25-year-old preacher was killed in May after he and an accomplice apparently opened fire on police who had interrupted them as they were robbing a shipping container, according to a cursory report in the Daily Janbaz, a neighbourhood paper in Karachi.
The news, illustrated with a grisly photo of the dead man’s bloodied face, was a shock to his family. But it was not a complete surprise.
They had been dreading that he might be killed in what in Pakistan is known as an “encounter” with police ever since plainclothes officers launched an early-morning raid on their home in a slum area not far from the city’s port.
“They raided the house, shone torches in our face and took him away,” said Mansoor, one of Mutabar’s brothers. “We started visiting every police station but they all said: ‘We don’t have this guy.’
“We were told maybe the agencies have him,” he added, referring to Pakistan’s various, shadowy civilian and military intelligence outfits.
Death by police encounter is a nationwide phenomenon, but has become more common in Karachi, where police are under pressure to crack down on criminal gangs, street toughs controlled by political parties and Taliban-affiliated terrorists who have made Pakistan’s economic capital one of the most turbulent cities in Asia.
One of the measures of success used by police is how many terrorists they claim to have killed, which was more than 200 in September.
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**According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), 267 people died in police encounters between September 2013 and this June.
“Everyone knows most of these encounters are fake,” said Akhtar Baloch, a Karachi-based member of the HRCP. “It is always the same – the victims are picked up by ununiformed men, tortured for information and then killed in an encounter.”
When Khan’s body was finally returned to his family he not only had more than a dozen bullet wounds, but also a damaged eye and broken arm.
Rao Khalid, station house officer of the nearby Keamari police station, said Khan was associated with an armed wing of a political party, had been involved in extortion rackets, and had been charged under anti-terrorism laws. He denied the police covered up extrajudicial killings with tales of gunfights.
“Every citizen in Pakistan has the right to self-defence and every time we raid a terrorist hideout they definitely retaliate,” he said.
The occasional death of suspects already taken into custody could be explained, he said, by the fact that sometimes such people were taken along to the raids and were subsequently injured.
“Sometimes the informant also gets shot and people think it is a fake encounter,” he claimed.
But speaking privately, senior police officers say bogus “encounters” are the only way to take dangerous criminals and militants off the streets. They say a weak court system, overseen by easily intimidated judges, almost never convicts such men.
*******“Sometimes to fight monsters you have to become a monster yourself,” said one of Karachi’s most senior policemen.
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Chaudhry Aslam Khan, Karachi’s Dirty Harry, was killed in a car bomb attack in January. Photograph: Declan Walsh/The Guardian*********Police say they are at war with Karachi’s militant groups, particularly the Pakistani Taliban, which was responsible for the vast majority of the 130 policemen killed in the past eight months.
***********Among the senior figures targeted was Chaudhry Aslam Khan, the popular police chief who revelled in his reputation as Karachi’s Dirty Harry, and who was killed in a suicide car-bomb attack in January.
The Pakistani Taliban said at the time that the killing was intended to avenge Aslam’s involvement in “killing Taliban prisoners in CID cells in Karachi”.
“He was an encounter specialist, there were many complaints against him,” said Baloch of the HRCP. “Maybe for some people he was a hero but he was a killer and kidnapper.”
Encounter killings have risen since a military-backed operation launched last year by a newly elected government to impose order on Karachi. “Most of the time we get the right people, although there is always room for misjudgment,” said the senior police officer.
But given the near-total impunity enjoyed by the police it is not clear whether all the people killed in encounters are genuine threats.
Mutabar Khan’s family claim he had no connection with criminal or militant groups. His focus in life was his small shop and the months-long trips he would make around the country to proselytise alongside members of Tablighi-Jamaat, a preaching group dedicated to spreading an austere form of Islam.
The family suspect he was targeted after falling out with a gang who had been harassing a restaurant owner. Despite a mediation effort by local elders, the family believes Khan’s enemies fed false information to police.
Crime reporters say most of those killed were members of banned sectarian or militant groups.
One group that is far less likely to see its members killed in encounters is the militant wing of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the political party representing the descendants of Urdu-speaking Muslims who moved from India to Pakistan at partition.
Few police officers wish to cross a party that has maintained a firm grip on the city through violence and through a political machine that controls nearly all of Karachi’s parliamentary seats.
In the early 1990s the government sent the army into Karachi to brutally crack down on the group.
“On the list of encounter killings there will be very, very few MQM,” said the senior police officer. “There is a good reason behind it – all the police officers who were involved in the operation against the MQM in 1992 were all later killed.”
Khan’s poor family of factory and dock workers said they lacked any such influence, and that it had not even occurred to them to stage a protest. “We are not associated with any political party,” said Mansoor Khan. “We don’t know about these things. We just picked the body up for the funeral and brought him home.”
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