This guy was responsible for deaths of 100s of people. His main targets were Quetta’s Hazara community.
MUZAFFARGARH: Malik Ishaq, chief of banned sectarian outfit Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, his two sons Usman and Haq Nawaz, and 11 others were killed in an alleged exchange of fire with police personnel late on Tuesday night.
At least six policemen were injured in the alleged encounter.
Ishaq and his sons were arrested by the Counter-Terrorism Department a week ago. Following their latest arrest, the police had interrogated them and had subsequently taken them to Shahwala in Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district to aid the police in identifying suspected militants, sources in the CTD said.
The encounter appears to have taken place as militants attacked security forces and tried to free Ishaq who was killed in the ensuing exchange of fire, security sources say.
All bodies have been shifted to District Headquarters Hospital Muzaffargarh. The bodies of Ishaq and his sons will undergo a postmortem before being taken to Rahim Yar Khan, where he was based.
Lashkar-i-Jhangvi is regarded as the most extreme Sunni terror group in Pakistan and is accused of killing hundreds of Shias after its emergence in the early 1990s. The organisation is also said to have links with Al Qaeda.
The organisation was banned more than a decade ago by former president Pervez Musharraf.
Ishaq, who is a leader of the feared organisation, has been implicated in dozens of cases, mostly murder. He was arrested in 1997 and is implicated in dozens of cases. He was released on bail in July 2011 after serving a jail term of nearly 14 years.
Since his 2011 release he has been frequently put under house arrest as his sermons raised sectarian tensions. He was also arrested in 2013 over deadly sectarian attacks targeting the Hazara Shia community in Quetta. The first attack took place on Jan 10, 2013 targeting a Hazara snooker hall and killing 92 people and the second bomb attack occurred on Feb 16, killing 89 people. The attacks were claimed by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi.
Ishaq was also accused of masterminding, from behind bars, the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, which wounded seven players and an assistant coach, and killed eight Pakistanis.
The attacks saw Pakistan stripped of its right to co-host the 2011 cricket World Cup and jeopardised the future of international cricket in the country.