Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: “Some people are spreading rumours that the heir of Naqeebullah Shaheed will accept blood money. Let me clarify, I will not bargain on a single drop of the blood of my son, your son, and the son of the country,” Malik Muhammad Khan, father of Naqeebullah Mehsud, told a crowded press conference on Thursday.

He expressed his serious concerns over the delay in the arrest of former Malir SSP Rao Anwar who killed Naqeebullah in an extra judicial encounter.

Khan said state institutions’ failure to track down the suspect was tarnishing the country’s image globally. “Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has already declared Naqeeb Shaheed the son of the nation. Naqeeb Shaheed is now your son as well and I have no right to take a unilateral decision about my late son now,” he said, addressing the gathering.

Earlier, the focal person of the Grand Jirga, Saifur Rehman, expressed serious reservations on the investigations, saying that the government and state institutions had miserably failed to arrest the absconder Rao Anwar even after passage of 40 days.

“The failure to detain Rao Anwar and his accomplices has spread resentment among Pakistanis, and the Pashtun populace of Karachi in particular,” Rehman said, demanding that the central and provincial governments should accelerate their efforts to apprehend the main culprit.

He said that the government should honour the demands of Pashtun Jirga it had accepted last month in Islamabad during the sit-in.

“If Rao Anwar is not produced in the next hearing in the Supreme Court, then Grand Jirga will be well within its rights to launch a nationwide protest to build pressure for his arrest,” he remarked. To a question about former President Asif Ali Zardari’s remarks about Rao Anwar, Rehman said that Zardari’s statement had hurt the sentiments of millions of Pakistanis in general and the tribal people in particular, because the former president’s family was also a victim of terrorists. “It cannot be a policy of Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) to protect a notorious killer like Rao Anwar whose hands are red with the blood of hundreds of innocent civilian of the country,” he concluded.

Published in Daily Times, March 2^nd 2018.