Daily Times

Ten days after the so-called ‘encounter’ near Sahiwal on GT Road, the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab province has sent two suicide jackets and 10 hand-grenades to the forensic agency. The agency has shown its incapacity to examine it. The agency experts believe it is too late for them to examine the ‘recoveries’ and to conclude with anything authentic and concrete.

It may be mentioned here that the ‘encounter’ took place on January 19. First the CTD claimed that “four terrorists including two women were killed by their accomplices who were following the car on motorcycles”. Then, the CTD took the credit of killing four terrorists after the driver opened fire on the chasing CTD team. There were some more versions too. All of the Punjab police statements turned out to be bundles of white lies when video-clips of the incident went viral on the social media and the same were aired by leading TV channels. The CCTV footage also revealed the heinous crime of killings by the CTD team. The TV channels played quite active role in highlighting the real scene captured by the cellphones of the passengers and the eyewitnesses.

The government immediately formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to probe the matter. The JIT concluded with holding the CTD team responsible for the killings while no traces of an ‘encounter’ were found. The CTD could not ditch the public and media despite all its efforts to hide the facts with the support of the Punjab government. Top of the list of CTD supporters were three ministers; Muhammad Basharat Raja, Fayyazul Hassan Chohan and Mian Mahmoodur Rasheed.

The CTD team had quite cunningly wiped-off the crime-scene immediately after the incident. All their actions lead to dubious and suspicious state of affairs. The forensic agency was not invited to collect the evidence and examine the crime-scene. Obviously, what else could be the reason but that the CTD had to hide its own crimes. I don’t know if the JIT has taken note of these ommissions, and recorded them in its report. But the importance of saving the crime-scene for the sake of truth cannot be stressed enough.

Ten days after the so-called ‘encounter’ near Sahiwal on GT Road, the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab province has sent two suicide jackets and 10 hand-grenades to the forensic agency

In a way, the JIT also favoured the CTD team by not recording the statements of eyewitnesses present on the place of the incident when it first visited the site. Lately, only two persons recorded their eyewitness account at the Yousaf wala police station in Sahiwal on Monday. This suggests that perhaps the JIT proceedings are a mere eyewash.

Strangely, the police and JIT have asked the eyewitnesses to come to police stations to record their statements and to hand over the video clips. Instead of reaching out to the eyewitnesses, asking them to come to the police station is in fact a way of psychologically pressurising them.  The three-member committee of the National Commission on Human Rights (NCHR), an impartial and independent apex state institution, has also expressed concerns over the process of the probe against the culprits of the killings. They have shown their serious reservations on the CTD’s failure to preserve the crime-scene, as well as on the way the JIT has proceeded in its investigations.

Muhammad Shafiq Chaudhary, a member of the NCHR committee, has held that the entire probe is full of lacunas and flaws. Not preserving the crime-scene is in itself an act of crime, and it was done by those who were tasked to probe the crime.

The question remains why is everyone directly or indirectly trying to save the culprits involved in the fake encounter in Sahiwal? The answer is very simple. Once this case is taken to its logical end, action will be needed to deal with many more cases of similar nature that have occurred in the past.

The CTD performance has been questionable since its inception in July 2010. Earlier, questionable practices were explained away on grounds that the department was still in its infancy, and lack of resources and capacity to handle the counterterrorism were held responsible. But, the CTD’s performance remained lousy even three years after having been provided huge resources, equipment, and training by the armed forces and international agencies. So, in October 2013, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to merge the CTD Punjab with the proposed Anti-Terrorism Force (ATF) for the province. Then, the government was of the view that ‘the CTD had failed to achieve its objective of identification and arrest of high profile terrorists, their supporters, financers and to foil their plans’.

Then AIG Aftab Cheema was reprimanded for not being able to present during the briefing with the Prime Minister a single case where CTD had managed to trace or arrest a terrorist and foil any terrorist activity in the province.

The Punjab Police website reads: The CTD was restructured in early 2015 to meet the growing challenges of terrorism, CTD has been restructured. New roles were assigned to it in addition to its primary intelligence function. CTD now registers and investigates all terrorism related cases at the newly established CTD police stations. Creation of Counter Terrorism Force (CTF) within CTD is another landmark initiative. Highly educated corporals (1,200 in number) have been inducted and given most modern training with the collaboration of the armed forces and friendly countries. These corporals have been deployed all over the province to perform their mandated tasks. State of the art gadgetry and equipment have been provided to CTD and its infrastructure is being improved.”

The insiders believe that the Punjab Police and other concerned agencies cannot justify the resource the CTD has consumed so far for the results it has produced. The entire CTD regime would be exposed leaving unbearable questions for the government and the state institutions if the Sahiwal ‘encounter’ is probed in depth, impartially and without any influence and pressure. Simply, it would expose many similar unjustifiable incidents that have been presented to the public as feathers in the CTD cap.

The writer is an Islamabad-based policy advocacy, strategic communication and outreach expert

Published in Daily Times, January 31^st 2019.