CPJ.Pakistan.Roots.of.Impunity

POLICE OFFICERS ARE AFRAID. THOSE WHO WANT TO DO THEIR
JOBS ARE THWARTED OR, AS IN THE BABAR CASE, KILLED.
to the court?’ Buriro recalled the official as shouting. “I
replied: ‘I will never submit this report because I have
to follow the law. I am not your subordinate. This report
has been made to save the Rangers in this case.’” The
director inspector general “then threatened the court
reporters from Dunya TV and Dawn. And he told me,
‘You will no longer be in your position. You are going
against the government and the agencies so be careful or
you will face dire consequences in future.’”
Buriro decided just to do his job. He examined
20 witnesses including Soomro, who had filmed the
murder. Buriro produced the video in open court.
He cross-examined the defendants’ witness, an ISI
colonel. The prosecutors withstood anonymous phone
threats; they turned down bribes to let the case return
to the regular courts, where it would fade away. The
security apparatus was especially furious that uniformed
men were being tried in the anti-terrorism
court. “During the process of the case I was threatened
by the naval agencies. I was threatened by the ISI,”
Buriro said. The prosecutors were excoriated for not
damaging evidence in the case as instructed.
The year 2011 was a bad one for military officials.
They’d taken a blow not only from the United States
but also from the Pakistani public, their prowess put in
question by a foreign army’s ability to invade undetected
and kill Osama bin Laden. It was too much in
the wake of Abbottabad to have uniformed officers on
trial before civilian prosecutors affiliated with the PPP.
It was a matter of ghairat—honor.
Despite the intimidation, the ISI threats, and Interior
Minister Malik’s declarations of the Rangers’ innocence,
the prosecutors won the case. The judge sentenced one
Ranger to death, and the others, including the civilian
who had dragged Shah before the Rangers, to life in
prison. That’s when the government and the agencies
ratcheted up the pressure on Buriro and Mirza.
“The army and agency believe any discussion of
anti-terrorism should be with them, not the civilian
government,” Ayesha Haroon, former editor of The
News, said in an interview before her death in 2013.
“It’s the strength of civilian government that we had
public prosecutors who with a free media could take
cases like the Rangers and support them to go forward.
But then we have the pushback that comes from the
army and establishment. There’s always this battle, but
slowly it is moving in the right direction. They managed
to prosecute the Rangers.”
The trial concluded on August 12, 2011. The defense
appealed. And on August 17, Buriro and Mirza flew to
the United States with the permission of the Pakistani
government. As prosecutors in the anti-terrorism
court, they’d been selected by the U.S. Consulate in
Karachi to attend a program convened by the Defense
Institute of International Legal Studies at the Newport,
R.I., naval station. The course fell under the rubric of
the Kerry-Lugar Act’s training and capacity-building;
the Pakistanis sent military and intelligence officers as
well. Even in the United States, Buriro said, he came
under pressure from Pakistani military officers not to
give a briefing on the Rangers case because it would
“cause defamation and seriously damage the reputation
of Pakistan.” He went ahead with the briefing anyway.
Much of the physical and psychological intimidation
of journalists and judicial officials is precipitated by
the perception that they are either working with the
United States against Pakistan’s interests or exposing
the ISI-jihadi networks. The experience of Buriro and
Mirza was no exception. On the prosecutors’ return
to Karachi, the agencies began hounding them. “In the
Karachi bar association we were interrogated by the
ISI officers many times: ‘Why did we go to America
for training? What type of training? Why did we give
a briefing on the Rangers case in America? Why were
you invited? All others were uniformed persons from
other countries,’” Buriro said.
Buriro and Mirza were trouble for the army and the
intelligence. They understood the relationship between
the jihadis and the agencies, and they knew how uninterested
the establishment was in prosecuting terrorists.
“The agencies are not interested in convictions of
extremist guys,” Buriro said.
Every week, the prosecutors would get a visit from ISI
and military intelligence officers to discuss the terrorism
cases, to find out how many were being tried, how many
pending. “And always they’d say, ‘Why are you going after
good Muslims?’ or ‘What is the case against [Lashkar-e-
Janghvi leader] Akram Lahori? He is working for Islam.
Why are you working against him?’ We replied that the
government gave us the case. They should withdraw it.”
The MQM behaves with a little more subtlety
but not much. As soon as Buriro and Mirza
returned to Karachi, they began work on the
Wali Khan Babar case.
Buriro believes that Babar’s reporting got him in
trouble—coverage of extortion, targeted killings,
electricity theft, land-grabbing, riots. “In Gulestane-Jauhar
area, for example, which is dominated by
the MQM, people were using electricity without
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