Murtaza Bhutto

WE TOOK PHOTOS BY DODGING THE POLICE:
PRESS PHOTOGRAPHERS
H. A. Hamied
KARACHI, Dec 2, 1996: The tribunal investigating the causes of the death of
Mir Murtaza Bhutto and seven others in a police firing recorded the evidence
of two Press photographers who said they had been beaten and maltreated by
the police and their cameras seized, and one of them said he had not yet
received his camera.
Zahid Hussain, 45, who has worked for Dawn, AP, Reuters and other
newspapers and is now a freelancer, produced four photographs which he
had taken and which had been published in Urdu daily 'Koshish,' where he
was working on the day of the incident, and other dailies in the country and
abroad. The photographs, taken in darkness after the firing, showed the
bodies of the dead lying unattended and also showed one critically injured
man sitting beside a Pajero vehicle, while armed policemen are standing by or
moving around unconcerned.
Mr Hussain said the police had blocked all access to the place and the whole
area was cordoned off, but he took advantage of the darkness on the scene of
the incident to avoid being noticed and he spotted three bodies lying there,
one of them beneath a car.
When he clicked his camera, the flash light alerted the police and they kept
asking who was using the flash, but each time he retreated for a while by
hiding behind the small trees on the central island and then moved again in
search of his targets, that is, more bodies, and clicked the camera. Thus, he
took four photographs and all of them in colour to the great annoyance of the
police.
He said some of the cameramen were held by the police and when he had left
the place and went to Mideast Hospital, his fellow photographers reported
that they were still held up and their cameras had been seized and damaged.
At one stage, he said, he was told by the police to get lost (Bhag Jao) and he
was also insulted and abused. Further narrating his story, he said he actually
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