- Why no judicial inquiry?
Tribal elders have threatened a protest movement of the Afridi tribe if there is no judicial inquiry into the killing of five men in Hayatabad last Tuesday, and strenuously denied that the men were terrorists, as the police said. Though a movement by the Afridi tribe is not the right way to protest, the demand for a judicial inquiry does not seem unreasonable. Let alone five, even the killing of one person in an incident involving the police, should automatically mean a judicial enquiry. Such an inquiry is not a trial, but is meant to be an exploration of operating procedures, to determine not just if they were followed, but if they are correct in the first place. Yet a judicial inquiry is a big deal. The judicial inquiry into the killing of four people by the Counter-Terrorism Department of the police had to be promised by none other than the Prime Minister himself.
It is to be hoped that the pressures of the War on Terror are not forcing the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police into following the example of the Punjab Police. The KP Police was held up as an example, of a force which did not practice the worst excesses of the Punjab police, who among other things are notorious for the faking of encounters, in which it tries to pass off the coldblooded killing of criminals as the result of a firefight. Those are cases where the Punjab police acts as judge, jury and executioner, not bothering with the formality of providing evidence to a court. That Pakhtuns are resentful of such treatment as was shown by the wave of support for the Pashtoon Tahaffuz Movement. It might be remembered that that had been sparked by the killing of Naquibullah Mahsud, a tribesman settled in Karachi, whose killing by the Sindh Police (by an officer of SP rank) was claimed as an encounter, with Naquibullah labelled a terrorist.
Finding out what went right, or wrong, can only be done by an outside party, a judge. It is in the government’s interest to find out what went wrong (or right), and it only makes sense to oppose it, if embarrassing truths will be revealed, such as the KP Police being driven to adopt Punjab Police methods in the War on Terror, with all the attendant evils.
