Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (57 page)

Asif Jatoi was uninjured at that point. He had been next to Asghar in the back of the blue Pajero, but was unharmed. Asghar says that he heard my father speaking after the shooting. He heard him say, ‘They got us, Zardari and Abdullah Shah’ – the Chief Minister of Sindh – ‘finally got us . . .’ Asif says he heard it too. I’ve never been
able to concentrate on Papa’s dying declaration. They weren’t his last words, not for me at least, they meant something larger. That he was speaking at all meant, up until that point, that Papa was OK. He was alive.

Ashiq got out of the driver’s seat and, holding his arm with his uninjured hand, tried again, in vain, to call for help. He called out for an ambulance to come and help the injured. After some time, sensing no one was going to alert the medics and that this was how the police intended it, Ashiq returned to the car to tend to Murtaza.

Qaisar and Asif Jatoi tell me separately they saw the police approach my father. ‘We were lying on the road,’ Qaisar tells me, confirming what other witnesses have testified in court, ‘and we saw Mir
baba
being taken out of the car. I saw blood on his clothes, but he was strong. He got out of the car on his own and walked.’

Ghulam Hasnain, the investigative journalist who wrote the exposé on Operation Clean-Up, was at the scene of my father’s murder. He had been at the Karachi Press Club when he heard of the shooting and rushed straight over to Clifton. ‘We saw your father being led into the police car,’ he told me when we met to discuss the murder twelve years later. ‘There were two or three cops inside with him and he was sitting upright and holding on to the side of the car.’
⁵
Hasnain remembered seeing bodies lying all over the road. ‘I used to carry a leather bag with notebooks and cameras,’ he says. ‘When the police saw us, they started snatching our bags.’ Only one journalist who had come along with Hasnain managed to hide his camera and took furtive photographs when the police weren’t looking. Hasnain, who is one of the most respected journalists in Karachi, tells me that the street lights had been turned off so the junior officers wouldn’t know who they had been summoned to kill that night. I don’t know if I believe that. ‘Shoaib Suddle’ – one of the police contingent – ‘is a criminologist,’ Hasnain says when I voice doubt about the street lights, ‘everything has a reason.’

‘Mir
baba
was fine at that point,’ Asif Jatoi tells me later. ‘He didn’t even need to lean on anyone. The police’ – Asif remembers the group including Rai Tahir, Shukaib Qureshi and Shahid Hayat – ‘told
Mir
baba
that they were going to take him to hospital and he walked over to the police car. He got into the open back section, where the policemen sit, and the APC drove off. As it neared
Do Talwar
, it stopped. We heard a single shot. Then it drove off again.’

It was the last shot that killed my father. He had been injured, but he would have survived. He was walking and talking. It would take more than one bullet to kill Papa and the policemen made sure that the last bullet did the job. The last shot, Papa’s autopsy showed, was fired into his jaw at point-blank range. It was fired, forensics confirmed, by a gunman standing over him as he lay down in the police car.

Ashiq was still in the car after Papa had been taken away by the police. Asif Jatoi was lying down on the road when he heard Wajid Durrani and Shukaib Qureshi speaking. They were talking freely and openly. ‘
Isko khatam karna
,’ one of them said.
Finish him off
. According to Asif, Shukaib Qureshi then walked to the car and opened the door to the driver’s seat and took Ashiq out of the car.

Shukaib Qureshi, all the survivors tell me when I speak to them separately and over the course of a year, was wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. They tell me that he was the only one wearing such protective gear. He was prepared. It is a significant point. Besides Zardari, Shukaib Qureshi, who was an absconder from the courts for twelve years, is the only accused to have been acquitted in the middle of an ongoing trial. Qureshi fled Pakistan in the aftermath of the murder and moved to England, where he worked as a lawyer, first in a private law firm and later as in-house counsel for a multinational firm. He returned to Pakistan only after Zardari became President, entering the country as a fugitive and as an absconder from the law who was miraculously spared prison. He, of course, denies having anything to do with the assassination.

Ashiq was led away, no one can say where. No one knows. When he was next seen he was dead, killed with a shot to the back of the head.

At around 8.30, just before I would make my call to the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad, both my father and Ashiq had been
moved and killed and Rai Tahir had made a final sweep of the bloodstained road. The police, Asif Jatoi says, kicked Yar Mohammad’s dead body in the face. They put their boots on his and Qaisar’s faces, pressing down on them and rubbing their heels in their mouths. Approximately forty minutes had passed since the police had begun their operation.

‘We heard a voice say, “
Auw jawano, kam hogaya
,”’ Qaisar tells me. ‘Come, boys, our work is done’. ‘Then we were blindfolded and loaded into the police vans. We didn’t know where we were being taken.’ He pauses. ‘I’ll never get that voice out of my ears,’ Qaisar says, dropping his head. ‘We heard it again in the torture cells where the police kept us after the murder,’ Mahmood adds. They were taken to Clifton police station. Outside the station, all the dead bodies had been lined up for identification. Qaisar was ordered to identify the bodies and says he saw Ashiq’s body among the others. No one would see the body again till after two in the morning the next day, six hours later. It was standard Operation Clean-Up; keep the bodies, destroy the evidence.

The street outside our house was hosed clean; all the blood and glass was washed away. By the time Mummy and I left the house at around 8.45, some fifteen minutes later, the police had removed all the evidence.

Ashiq’s in-laws owned a medical centre in Clifton called Mideast and many well-known local doctors held their outpatient clinics there. My paediatrician used to practise at Mideast, as did many other doctors we knew. It was where we bought our Strepsils, Band-Aids and other first-aid necessities. Mideast was a fine establishment, but it was not an emergency hospital. A large sign on its glass doors, in capital letters, said as much. It was a clinic, a dispensary, a recovery centre. But it was not an emergency hospital.

Ashiq’s only son, Aneed, had driven to Mideast to play computer games with his cousins. The offices there had faster internet connections
than the rest of the city. Aneed was eighteen years old and about to go abroad to university. ‘I heard the shots as we were walking into Mideast that night,’ remembers Aneed, who at six feet tall is a striking copy of his father, even down to his heavy voice and patient manner. ‘People came out from the hospital in a panic when they heard the gunfire. “What’s all this firing?” someone said and I replied, casually, “It’s Karachi, there’s firing everywhere.”’
⁶
Another half an hour would pass before Aneed had cause to worry.

After the police fired the fatal shot into my father’s jaw, they drove the police car the few metres over to Mideast. Only two hospitals in Karachi, Jinnah and Civil, take gunshot victims because they are police cases and therefore require official paperwork. These are well-known facts. The police, however, took my father to Mideast. It was intentional. He was not going to get the care he needed there. They dropped Papa, his midnight-blue
shalwar kameez
covered in blood, outside the hospital and drove off.

Aneed heard a great deal of commotion and found out that Murtaza Bhutto had just been brought into Mideast in a critical condition. He raced down to the hospital’s lobby just as my father was being put on a stretcher and moved inside by Mideast staff. Aneed never told me that he’d been at Mideast when my father was left there. I never knew. It’s a shock to me when this comes up as we are speaking about the night of the murder thirteen years later and I feel my hands shake as he speaks. Aneed tells me that he was standing there in the lobby; he says my father’s face and body were drenched in blood. ‘He had one leg flat on the stretcher and one bent, he was trying to get up,’ Aneed says, describing my Papa fighting for his life.

Aneed and I are similar in many ways. We’re seen as the tough, domineering types in our families and when we all get together, our siblings often complain that we spend too much time talking about politics and mafia movies. I cannot cry in front of him. I do not want to cry in front of Aneed, whom I respect and admire, but I did not know that my father was conscious when he was brought into Mideast. If only Mummy and I had reached Mideast ten minutes sooner than we did, we would have seen Papa conscious. He would have seen us,
he would have known we were there with him. ‘He was conscious when he arrived,’ Aneed continues. ‘He looked at me, our eyes met. He was holding his jaw and his neck with his hand and he was trying to speak, but he couldn’t. There was a lot of blood. It hit me, this was serious. You know that sense of worry you get? I got it then. To see Murtaza Bhutto, who was so large and strong physically, like that . . .’ Aneed mentions that he remembers my father wearing cufflinks and I tell him, desperate to have a minute to breathe and collect my thoughts, that they were a gift from Mummy. ‘People started asking me where my father was,’ Aneed recalls. ‘And I didn’t know. I knew they had been together that evening, so I found a Mideast worker and asked him what he had heard about the shooting. At some point I asked him what car Baba had been in – I knew there was a convoy – I didn’t know they had been in the same car. He looked worried when I asked and he told me, “Your father was driving Mir Murtaza. They were together.” Still, I thought then that things would be OK, I thought somehow that they’d both survive.’

Asif Zardari was on the phone. ‘Don’t you know?’ he said casually to me. ‘Your father’s been shot.’ I dropped the phone. My body went numb and cold and my heart beat so hard it drowned out everything around me. Mummy picked up the phone. She saw my face, I looked ashen. She must have known something was terribly wrong though I couldn’t get the words out to say anything or even look at her. She screamed. I don’t remember what she said. I was frozen to my chair, Papa’s green armchair.

It must be the arm, I kept telling myself. He must be hit in the arm; it can’t be serious, maybe the leg. Why would Zardari tell me, a fourteen-year-old girl, that my father had been shot if it had been serious? I couldn’t breathe. Mummy must have called for the car. The next thing I knew she was running towards the door. I got up and ran after her. ‘Stay here!’ she yelled. ‘No!’ I screamed back. ‘I’m coming with you!’ Zulfi was sitting in the lobby now, with Sofi, his nanny
from when he was a baby. Sofi watched Mummy and me yelling at each other in the corridor by the door. She held Zulfi close to her and tried to distract him from our screaming.

‘Fati, it’s dangerous!’ Mummy shouted. But I wouldn’t let her leave without me. ‘He’s my father!’ I cried and grabbed her arm, pulling her with me to the car. She couldn’t stop me. Mummy held on to me as we drove out of the house. The roads were clean, empty. I remember looking out, searching the dark streets for some sign and seeing nothing, calming myself into believing that whatever had happened wasn’t serious. It must be the arm, I kept repeating to myself and to Mummy like a mantra I was desperate for us to believe.