ISLAMABAD: Opening his lips only partially in the National Assembly on Thursday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan talked of the government possessing unspecified `proofs’ that could be shared with British authorities regarding the unresolved 2010 murder of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) leader Imran Farooq, in London, where self-exiled party chief Altaf Hussain lives.

He said Mr Farooq’s muder as well as a March 11 security raid on the MQM headquarters in Karachi and some subsequent outbursts by the MQM chief Altaf Hussain against Pakistan’s military were discussed when British High Commissioner Philp Barton came to meet him in Islamabad.

Know more: Altaf in focus as British envoy, Nisar meet

Though the minister said Islamabad had yet made “no formal request” to London to restrain Mr Hussain from making such statements, he also did not talk of any such suggestion made informally while he talked to the British diplomat.

And he seemed piling pressure on an embattled MQM by speaking about the possibility of cooperation with the British police and giving them “whatever proofs Pakistan has” about the murder, hours after a MQM worker on death row, Saulat Mirza, accused the party chief in a taped video from jail of ordering a 1997 murder by him of the managing director of what was then called Karachi Electric Supply Corporation.

Both the MQM chief and a party senator, Babar Ghauri, whom Mr Mirza accused of having conveyed the orders to him and a group of his colleagues, rejected the charge, which was aired late on Wednesday night by private television channels just before President Mamnoon Hussain stayed the hanging of the convict that was due to have taken place at the Mach jail in Balochistan in the early hours of Thursday.

Chaudhry Nisar, who has withheld for four days making a detailed policy statement in the house on the raid on the MQM leader’s house serving as party headquarters in Karachi by Rangers, said he would be prepared to speak about that raid if asked by the house.

But neither party in the house nor Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq asked for such a statement immediately although a government ally, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party leader Mahmood Khan Achakzai, had earlier complained that the government was keeping the house in the dark while newspapers had been full of stories about the issue for many days.

Apparently trying to dispel the general impression that the video won Mr Mirza three more days of life, the minister said the president gave the reprieve on the advice of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif following a request from the Balochistan government on the grounds of the convict’s ill-health, as was done, for a different reason, for Shafqat Hussain from Azad Kashmir to allow more time for checks on whether the convict for a 2004 murder of a Karachi boy was a juvenile at the time of occurrence.

Mr Nisar had refrained from speaking on the issue on the opening day of the current session of the house on Monday in a trade off after MQM parliamentarians withdrew an adjournment motion they had submitted for a debate on the raid, which the Rangers said had resulted in the recovery of a large quantity of illegal weapons and detention of dozens of activists from the party headquarters called “Nine Zero” and surrounding streets.

All 23 MQM members of the National Assembly stayed away from the house on Thursday for the third day running and there was no indication if they would come to the current session, which is due to last until March 27, while their party appeared facing its worst face-off with security forces since two deadly confrontations in the 1990s.

It was probably the first time that the interior minister publicly spoke of “proofs” that Pakistani authorities might have about the murder of Mr Farooq, who was found murdered near his home on Sept 16, 2010, while returning from work at a pharmacy.

Though finger-pointing has often been made, Britain’s Scotland Yard police have so far not come out with any conclusion, while Pakistani authorities never confirmed media reports that they were holding two men who arrived in the country from London shortly after Mr Farooq’s murder.

Talking of the issue, Chaudhry Nisar said: “As a responsible government, whatever proofs Pakistan has would be submitted.”

Without giving any hint of the nature of such `proofs’, he counselled lawmakers “not to look for any political implication” the government’s cooperation with the British police, and said “the purpose was only to crack a crime”.

TOO FEW TO LISTEN: States and Frontier Regions Minister Abdul Qadir Baloch, speaker to the house, later said that out of about 2,700,000 people displaced by military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, 900,000 had returned to their homes and the rehabilitation of the remaining 1800,000 would be completed by December 2016.

But less than 20 lawmakers seemed to be present when the minister wound up a long-pending debate on the problems being faced by the internally displaced persons and that promoted him to ask at one point “for whom should I make the speech (when) there are no listeners”.

That prompted Deputy Speaker Murtaza Abbasi to tell the minister “it is not your job” to point this out.

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2015

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