Re: SP CID Karachi Ch Aslam killed
Lion-Hearted people like Ch Aslam are irreplaceable!!! his matrydom is not just a setback for Karachi, but for Pakistan as well. I’m sure many Karachites used to sleep peacefully at night knowing there is Ch. Aslam working day in and night to save many lives in his fight
against TTP and LJ. He never wore a bullet proof vest - he used to say his white shalwar kameez is his shroud! Like someone above said, we are not worthy of such courageous people, we dont deserve their scarifices, especially those who still believe in good and bad taliban.
If you asked Karachi’s most fearsome policeman how many terrorists, gangsters and thugs he had gunned down in the line of duty, he would be momentarily stumped.
**“I don’t keep a record of it,” he said. “In the course of my career it must be a big number. You couldn’t count it on your hands.”
**This is justice Karachi-style, administered with unsentimental brutality in the backstreets of a sprawling megacity, a pulsating port riddled with violence, gangster politics and Islamic extremism. Here police officers face the daily threat of death and a growing Pakistan](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/) Taliban presence.
Chaudhry Aslam might not have remembered the number of bounties but he kept copies of the government cheques. They added up to £600,000 and were rising – right up until his death at the hands of a suicide bomber on Thursday](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10561010/Pakistans-top-Taliban-hunter-killed-in-terrorist-attack.html).
**“No cop in the world has probably got that much money,” he said with a grin and chesty chuckle in an interview carried out last year.
As chief of the city’s Anti-Extremism Cell — **a unit of 100 men tasked with tackling the bewildering array of terrorist outfits operating in Karachi — that made Mr Aslam, 48, one of the most important players in the latest phase of the West’s fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And his opponents knew it. **
His was one of five names on their hit list of senior police officers. He had survived nine assassination attempts and been shot five times in the line of duty.
Such ***was the aura of risk that surrounded him that he had been unable to find a landlord who would rent him and his family a house ever since his last was turned into a ten-foot crater by a Taliban suicide bomber two years ago.](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8772725/Suicide-bomber-kills-eight-in-attack-on-senior-Pakistan-policeman.html) He had to give up one address when the neighbours went to court to prevent him living there.
More recently he lived with his wife and children on police premises.
His working day would start as the sun went down. His patrols departed after midnight - all the better to catch terrorists.
“*In Pakistan all work is done in the night,” he said, sitting on plastic garden furniture in the darkness of a grassy courtyard at the nondescript police station that was his headquarters until his death. “All these terrorists that we have to catch are active at night. They hide during the day.”
*
Even in the dark, few knew Karachi’s mean streets as well as Mr Aslam. The bags under his eyes and the white streaks to his grey beard showed the toll of 27 years in the police force. His skin had the pallor of a nightworker.
***“For me, in my religion, if I die in the line of duty fighting criminals then I am a martyr and for us that’s like a new life,” he said, lighting the next in a never ending chain of cigarettes.
**
**Last year’s general election was marked by Taliban death threats to secular parties and a spike in violence. **](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/10041611/Pakistan-Taliban-threatens-to-bomb-polling-stations-in-Karachi.html)
The most deadly attack came in March, when at least 48 people died. A car bomb exploded outside a Shia mosque injuring a further 160 people.
The subsequent investigation revealed a lot about how justice in Karachi and Pakistan works — or fails, depending on your point of view.
In the days after the attack Mr Aslam led a team to arrest Gul Aslam Mehsud, the main suspect who was hiding out in Pashtunabad, an area of the city largely populated by migrants from the north-west and a haven for Taliban factions.
At a press conference the police announced they had captured the mastermind and recovered AK-47s, grenades and 125kg of explosives. They also revealed plans for a string of further attacks against the American consulate, the headquarters of the MQM, a secular political party, and a hospital.
“We interrogated him and he revealed this other attack against the hospital with a vehicle,” said Mr Aslam, taking up the story and describing the night-time raid he launched to capture the rest of the gang.
“When we got there an encounter took place. Since Gul Aslam was with us, he was injured along with two other police officers, and he was taken to hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.”
The main murder suspect was dead, killed in what locals describe as an “encounter”, but Mr Aslam still collected a bounty of £46,000 on his death.
Allegations of brutality, torture and extrajudicial executions are something of an occupational hazard for Pakistan’s police officers. Mr Aslam spent 18 months in prison in 2006 after being accused of killing an innocent man but was later cleared.
He always denied any wrongdoing and said victims’ families levelled accusations only for the courts to dismiss their allegations.
During the interview, a crowd of officers jumped to his defence.
**“If in a police encounter a criminal dies in mysterious circumstances you see all the human rights activists come out with their placards in protest,” said one officer. “When a cop is martyred in the line of duty, you don’t see that but policemen are also humans.”
**Mr Aslam’s reputation and neat turn of phrase made him a frequent target for criticism, but numerous surveys suggested he was not alone in his uncompromising techniques.
A survey by the US Institute of Peace reported: “There is a general perception that the institution of the police is corrupt, institutionally incompetent, and brutal. Consequently, justice is elusive, insecurity is rampant, and ordinary citizens are the victims of this system.” For their part, police officers say they are undermanned in the face of a powerful enemy and an overstretched courts system that frequently fails to secure convictions.
**“The job of the police is generally to arrest people and get them to court,” said Mr Aslam. "Here we are fighting a war.
“What am I supposed to do? They carry out bomb blasts in my city. Should I go and talk to them nicely? If they throw bombs should I start throwing flowers?”
**As one Western diplomatic source put it: “The drones can hunt you down in the mountains of North Waziristan but they’ll never find you in Karachi’s slums.”
*That put Mr Aslam on the frontline not just of Karachi’s wars but the global hunt for al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies, a job that he said was not appreciated by the rest of the world which frequently criticised Pakistan for not doing enough.
***“The war is to make the world a safer place,” he said. “We are sacrificing so much here.”
**It was past midnight by the time he finished telling his story. He gathered his men around him to begin briefing them on the raids ahead.
**He would head into the night with only his AK-47 for protection, favoured because he said it would not jam or let him down. While his colleagues might pull on body armour he said he preferred only his shalwaar kameez — or his “shroud” as he morbidly described it.
“I’ve never worn a bullet proof jacket,” he said. “It might save my life but it’s not my style.”
Pakistan’s answer to Dirty Harry - Telegraph
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