Scenes
of sectarian violence in Pakistan
Book Reveals
ISI was Involved in 1990 Murder of Iranian Diplomat in Lahore
Special
SAT Report
WASHINGTON,
Sept 15: A former Pakistani police official has disclosed that
Pakistan's infamous Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) operatives
were directly involved in the 1990 murder of a senior Iranian
diplomat in Lahore, an event which he claims, changed the course
of Shia-Sunni confrontation in Pakistan, for the worse.
In
his just released book, Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah,
The Army, And America's War On Terror, published by M.E.
Sharpe, Hassan Abbas, currently Research Fellow at the Harvard
Law School and a PhD. candidate at the Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy, Tufts University, reveals that while Iranian Consul
General Sadiq Ganji was shot by notorious terrorist Riaz Basra,
“the other person on the motorcycle with Basra conducting
the Ganji murder operation was an ISI official named Athar, a
low-level official from the Pakistan Air Force..”
This
is the first time that any Establishment insider has revealed
the direct involvement of the ISI in important political murders
in Pakistan although Hassan Abbas has tried to dilute his disclosures
by adding: “However, it is not known whether the (Ganji)
assassination was an act approved by the military and the ISI
command, or if some rogue element in the ISI had given a go-ahead
on his own..”
It
is interesting to note that instead of Riaz Basra, who the book
says killed Sadiq Ganji, another Sunni activist Sheikh Haq Nawaz
Jhangvi, was convicted and hanged on March 1, 2001 for Sadeq Ganji’s
assassination. This fact is, however, not mentioned in the book.
The book reveals deep foreign links,
specially Iranian and Saudi funded operations in Pakistan to further
their own sectarian supporters and gives names of officials and
details of how Pakistan was turned into a battle ground between
Shia and Wahabi militant wings.
It
also throws light on how political governments tried to curtail
the ISI role and influence in sectarian violence but all such
attempts were foiled by the ISI, including even an abortive attempt
to assassinate former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif because he was
pushing too hard.
The
following excerpts of the book deal with the Ganji murder and
related sectarian issues, including the rise of Riaz Basra as
an international terrorist who, the book claims, had also developed
close links with Osama ben Laden and Al-Qaeda.
Basra
was killed in May 2002 in an encounter with the Punjab police
after years of staying successfully on the run.
Excerpts:
“ While Ganji was leaving his hotel premises on Lahore’s
Mall Road, two assailants riding on a motorcycle emerged on the
scene and shot him dead. A twenty-three-year-old SSP activist,
Riaz Basra, was the man who delivered for the SSP. After accomplishing
the task, he conveniently ran away as police were nowhere near
the crime scene.
This feat ensured a promising career
for Basra as a terrorist. He belonged to a poor family and had
studied in a Madrasa, Darul Uloom-e-Islamia based in Allama Iqbal
town, (Lahore Memorizing Quran), but as it turned out, Jhangvi’s
philosophy sounded more attractive to him. He had joined the SSP
in 1988 as an ordinary member, but killing Ganji made him a hero
among the party sympathizers, who encouraged him to repeat the
performance.
There was no shortage of targets,
but Iran was angry and the political leadership in Pakistan was
quite embarrassed, resulting in increased pressure on the police
to arrest the culprits. Basra was arrested on June 5, 1992, bringing
some respite for the political government, but he had influential
“friends” who wanted to see him in action rather than
languishing in jail. They were powerful enough to ensure that
they got what they wanted, or perhaps they owed him a favor. In
either case, a successful rescue operation helped Basra escape
from police custody while he was being taken from the jail to
a special court hearing on April 30, 1994.
No
credible information has come to light yet as to the exact identity
of his “friends,” but most probably they were the
same on whose behalf he had eliminated the Iranian diplomat. A
former Pakistani intelligence operator reveals that Basra was
operating in league with some junior ISI agents.
According to his information the other person on the motorcycle
with Basra conducting the Ganji murder operation was an ISI official
named Athar, a low-level official from the Pakistan Air Force
serving with the agency. However, it is not known whether the
assassination was an act approved by the military and the ISI
command, or if some rogue element in the ISI had given a go-ahead
on his own, which was possible as some disgruntled elements in
the ISI had started operating independently.
However, the 1979 Iranian revolution changed the character and
magnitude of sectarian politics in Pakistan. It emboldened Pakistani
Shias, who in turn became politicized and started asserting their
rights.
The
zealous emissaries of the Iranian revolutionary regime started
financing their organization Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Fiqa-i-Jaferia (TNFJ—Movement
for the Implementation of Jafaria Religious Law) and providing
scholarships for Pakistani students to study in Iranian religious
seminaries.
For
the Zia regime though, the problematic issue was Shia activism
leading to a strong reaction to his attempts to impose Hanafi
Islam (a branch of the Sunni sect). For this he winked to the
hardliners among the Sunni religious groups in order to establish
a front to squeeze the Shias.
It
was in this context that Jhangvi was selected by the intelligence
community to do the needful. It is also believed that the JUI
recommendation played the decisive part in this choice. The adherents
of the Deobandi school were worried about the Shia activism for
religious reasons anyhow. State patronage came as an additional
incentive. Consequently, in a well-designed effort, Shia assertiveness
was projected as their disloyalty to Pakistan and its Islamic
ideology.
In
a few months, Saudi funds started pouring in, making the project
feasible. For Saudi Arabia, the Iranian revolution was quite scary,
for its ideals conflicted with that of a Wahabi monarchy. More
so, with an approximately 10 percent Shia population, Saudi Arabia
was concerned about the expansion of Shia activism in any Muslim
country. Hence, it was more than willing to curb such trends in
Pakistan by making a financial investment to bolster its Wahabi
agenda.
According
to Vali Raza Nasr, a leading expert on the sectarian groups of
Pakistan, the flow of these funds was primarily routed through
the Pakistan military and the ISI. It is not known whether American
support for this scheme was readily available, but the Zia regime
knew well that the United States would be glad to acquiesce, given
the rising US-Iran hostility. However, some analysts believe that
CIA funds were involved in the venture.
The
campaign started in Jhang, Jhangvi’s hometown, in the form
of a movement against the Shia feudal lords of the area - an anti-Shia
program in this region was politically an attractive slogan to
win public support. The SSP’s formal goals were well defined:
to combat the Shias at all levels, to strive to have them declared
a non-Muslim minority, and to make Sunni Islam the official religion
of the state.
Though
undermining Shias was the immediate target, the creation of a
theocratic state was the ultimate aim. To begin with, Jhangvi
in his public speeches argued that keeping religion and state
apart was a conspiracy hatched by the enemies of Islam, with the
outcome that the political sphere was in the hands of corrupt
and ungodly politicians.
Another critical repercussion of
this movement was a gradual rise of the Deobandis to prominence
as against other Sunni groups, most notably at the expense of
the Barelvis. This was to have long-term consequences for Pakistan
because the Deobandi view of jihad is arguably narrow-minded and
violence-prone compared to that of any other Sunni sect. For the
SSP leadership, murdering Shias was pure jihad, but implementation
of this agenda was yet some time off.
In
the early days (late 1980s), the SSP confined its activities to
publicly abusing Shias and producing jihadi literature declaring
them Kafir (infidels) implicitly issuing their death warrants.
They needed some time to motivate, groom, and train jihadis who
would physically eliminate Shias, so in the meantime local criminals
and thugs were hired to do the “needful.” Criminal
elements soon realized that this was a mutually beneficial deal—coming
under the umbrella of religious outfits provided a perfect cover
for their own activities. Over time, the drug traders also developed
their ties with sectarian groups, especially the SSP, reproducing
in Pakistan relationships between militant groups and drug traffickers
that had already evolved in Afghanistan.
While Shia activists were following these developing trends closely
and making themselves ready to counter the SSP propaganda effectively,
the leader of TNFJ, Arif Hussaini, was assassinated in August
1988, serving a severe blow to the Shias. Hussaini had lived in
Iran for a while and had a close working relationship with the
Iranian regime.
The
ISI hand was suspected in the murder, as a serving army officer,
Majid Raza Gillani, had participated in this “operation.”
Soon it was Jhangvi’s turn - he was murdered within a year
of Hussaini’s elimination, though the SSP suspected a Jhang-based
Sunni political leader, Shaikh Iqbal. Iqbal was believed to be
the main beneficiary of the rise in Shia-Sunni hostility, as the
Sunni majority of Jhang was certain to believe that the murder
was perpetrated by Shias, thus creating sympathy for Iqbal and
increasing his prospects in the coming elections.
A
few SSP activists who had inside information thus attacked Iqbal’s
house in Jhang and brutally murdered his brother in broad daylight,
though the message conveyed to the SSP cadres and sympathizers
was that Shias killed Jhangvi so as to gain maximum benefit by
encouraging hatred against Shias.
This was not without consequences.
A few incidents of physical attacks on Shias had taken place in
1988–89, but the event that changed the course of Shia-Sunni
confrontation for the worse was the murder of Sadiq Ganji, the
Iranian consul general in Lahore in 1990.
While
Ganji was leaving his hotel premises on Lahore’s Mall Road,
two assailants riding on a motorcycle emerged on the scene and
shot him dead. A twenty-three-year-old SSP activist, Riaz Basra,
was the man who delivered for the SSP. After accomplishing the
task, he conveniently ran away as police were nowhere near the
crime scene. This feat ensured a promising career for Basra as
a terrorist.
He
belonged to a poor family and had studied in a Madrasa, Darul
Uloom-e-Islamia based in Allama Iqbal town, (Lahore Memorizing
Quran), but as it turned out, Jhangvi’s philosophy sounded
more attractive to him. He had joined the SSP in 1988 as an ordinary
member, but killing Ganji made him a hero among the party sympathizers,
who encouraged him to repeat the performance.
There
was no shortage of targets, but Iran was angry and the political
leadership in Pakistan was quite embarrassed, resulting in increased
pressure on the police to arrest the culprits. Basra was arrested
on June 5, 1992, bringing some respite for the political government,
but he had influential “friends” who wanted to see
him in action rather than languishing in jail.
They
were powerful enough to ensure that they got what they wanted,
or perhaps they owed him a favor. In either case, a successful
rescue operation helped Basra escape from police custody while
he was being taken from the jail to a special court hearing on
April 30, 1994.
No credible information has come to light yet as to the exact
identity of his “friends,” but most probably they
were the same on whose behalf he had eliminated the Iranian diplomat.
A former Pakistani intelligence operator reveals that Basra was
operating in league with some junior ISI agents.
According to his information the other person on the motorcycle
with Basra conducting the Ganji murder operation was an ISI official
named Athar, a low-level official from the Pakistan Air Force
serving with the agency. However, it is not known whether the
assassination was an act approved by the military and the ISI
command, or if some rogue element in the ISI had given a go-ahead
on his own, which was possible as some disgruntled elements in
the ISI had started operating independently.
These were the times when the financial endowment of the SSP-run
Madrassas increased manifold, with the repercussion that factional
disputes over the control of the purse also surged.
Prospects of a financial bonanza attracted many other religious
extremists to jump into this theater and vie for rewards. In the
ensuing competition among such scoundrels, sectarian killings
in Pakistan increased in the 1990s.
Meanwhile,
Iranian funding to Shia organizations also increased, making Pakistan
a battleground for Saudi Arabia and Iran to settle their scores.
No effective measures were taken by the Pakistan government to
halt this slide into chaos.
Realizing that sectarian outfits were untouchable entities, professional
criminals hastened to join these groups and benefit from this
window of opportunity. For instance, when around 500 trained gunmen
belonging to MQM were abandoned by their masters, they tentatively
turned to the SSP in search of a job. They found it to be a promising
career. All they had to do was grow beards and learn a few anti-Shia
lessons. The rest they were already accustomed to - butchering
people.
During the 1990s the SSP spawned many splinter groups, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
(Army of Jhangvi, hereafter called Lashkar) being the most deadly
and prominent one, whereas other small outfits were mainly “personal
mafias of influential feudals, led by local mullahs.”
Many of the leaders of the SSP, including Israr ul Haq Qasmi and
Zia ur Rahman Farooqi, were murdered by extremists belonging to
Sipah-i-Mohammad (Army of Mohammad), a Shia militant outfit formed
in 1994. To tackle such attacks on its leadership, the SSP in
a planned move largely confined its activities to the political
arena under a felon, Azam Tariq, while Lashkar, led by the notorious
Riaz Basra, started operating in 1995–96 as a terrorist
group.
Basra’s
direct links with Arab financiers and the Taliban helped him establish
his base camp in Afghanistan. Before Lashkar’s emergence,
sectarian killings were mainly restricted to leaders and activists
of both the Shia and Sunnis, but Basra expanded the battlefield
by targeting Shia government officials, lawyers, doctors, and
traders, giving a new twist to the confrontation.
Even
Shia mosques came under attack, resulting in random killings of
innocent people. By virtue of such terrorist operations, Lashkar
distinguished itself as the most violent sectarian force in Pakistan.
It also openly admitted to its acts of terror, informing newspapers
through telephone calls and its publication Intiqam-i-Haq (dual
meaning - Revenge of Truth, or Revenge of Jhangvi). It also started
operating in Indian-controlled Kashmir but, keeping in line with
its philosophy, it embarked on this journey by starting to murder
Kashmiri Shia leaders before targeting the Indian forces.
By early 1997, Lashkar was ready for even bigger operations -
Iranian cultural centers in Lahore and Multan were burned down,
and Iranian diplomat Mohammad Ali Rahimi was killed in cold blood.
Basra immediately escaped to Afghanistan after orchestrating this
operation, where a HUA guest house was ready for him, but Ashraf
Marth, a senior police official, apprehended the other Lashkar
terrorists involved in the crime.
Marth
had the competence as well as political support to carry on his
investigation. In a few months he was able to track the funding
sources of Lashkar and, to everyone’s amazement, evidence
of foreign financing and records of funds transfers through US
banks were on the table of the prime minister.
One
of the men accused of the attacks was found with a credit card
issued from New York. This was enough to cause the prime minister
to jump in his seat. He immediately passed the information on
to the Army Chief. Before any action could be taken on the information,
Ashraf Marth was assassinated right in front of his official residence,
and the inquiry came to an abrupt closure.
The
attack was so well planned that half a dozen armed guards of Marth
could not move and the attackers vanished from the scene. Pakistani
intelligence agencies were thunderstruck, and police officials
were scared to get involved in such investigations. It is ironic
why the military intelligence agencies remained a silent witness
to such developments.
Basra had now become a legend among the religious hard-liners
in the country. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif finally decided to
target some sectarian groups, including Lashkar, through civilian
law enforcement agencies, as he was not expecting much support
from military intelligence agencies.
Tariq
Pervez, an accomplished counter terrorism expert in the police
service, was tasked to trace out the Lashkar terrorists and bring
them to justice. Tariq’s hard work and commitment paid off
when his special team was able to trace Basra, though there was
a problem. Basra was in Kabul, and that was beyond Tariq’s
jurisdiction.
On
getting the report, Nawaz Sharif personally requested the ISI
chief to get hold of him, knowing that they had close links with
the Taliban and HUA. He was told not to worry and that Basra would
be taken care of soon. Ironically, instead of Basra being apprehended,
Lashkar stepped up its activities and attempted to assassinate
the prime minister on January 3, 1999. The plot failed because
a remote-control bomb placed under a bridge that the prime minister
had to pass over detonated an hour too early.
How the assassination plan was botched is indeed an interesting
story. Gul Khan, Lashkar’s top bomb-making expert, was hiding
near the location with a remote control device, waiting for the
prime minister’s vehicle to approach the bridge. Due to
a lack of access to sophisticated equipment, he was using an ordinary
cordless telephone as a gadget to send the signal.
This
telephone set was on a VHC frequency, and he was not aware that
some police vehicles in the city were also using the same frequency
for their wireless communications. Meanwhile, the driver of a
police patrol vehicle surveying the prime minister’s travel
route, by pure coincidence, parked very close to the point where
the bomb was planted.
As
soon as the vehicle’s wireless set received a call, the
bomb detonator caught the signal too and the bomb exploded. Nawaz
Sharif was lucky - Gul Khan’s planning was perfect but the
technology he was using was outmoded. When he was arrested later,
the interrogations led police to connect the dots. Prior to this,
the police were of the view that one of the terrorist groups had
only sent a warning to Nawaz Sharif, telling him that they were
capable of eliminating him.
In reaction, Punjab’s chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, gave
the go-ahead to the Punjab police to eliminate the Lashkar terrorists
through all means possible. Around three dozen operators belonging
to SSP and LEJ were gunned down in staged police encounters, but
extra judicial killings, besides being obviously contrary to the
due process of law, were not the solution to the simmering problem.
With
no sign of abating, Lashkar activities witnessed an upsurge in
1999 when close to a hundred innocent people became victims of
its horrendous campaign.
Nawaz Sharif’s efforts to curb this menace during 1998–99
had failed miserably because Lashkar activists were using Afghanistan
as a sanctuary courtesy of the Taliban, who were known to be hospitable
to their guests. Another means of support was HUA’s logistic
backing, but the factor that really turned the scales in favor
of Lashkar was that Basra had developed a close working relationship
with Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
This was so lethal a combination that only an event like 9/11
could trigger events that would lead to this conglomerate’s
dismemberment.
