Mohammad Khan Mehsud, whose son Naqibullah Mehsud was shot to death, leaves the Supreme Court in Islamabad.


This picture taken on February 1 shows a member of the Pashtun community holding a placard showing a picture of Naqibullah Mehsud.

A senior police officer accused of a role in police killings surrendered to the Supreme Court yesterday after two months on the run, media said, in a case that has stirred anger about extra-judicial killings.
Rao Anwar, a senior superintendent of police in the port city of Karachi, was suspended on January 20 after four men were killed in a shootout with police.
Police initially said that the men were suspected Islamist militants but later suggested that the incident may have been an extra-judicial killing.
The shootout, in which police gunned down aspiring model Naqibullah Mehsud, has also brought to the fore the issue of racial profiling of Pakistan’s Pashtuns, who say they are targeted and harassed because many militants hail from their communities close to the border with Afghanistan.
“Rao Anwar presented himself through a lawyer in the court,” said Faisal Siddiqui, a lawyer for Mohammad Khan Mehsud, the father of the victim.
Television channels earlier broadcast images of Anwar, wearing a surgical mask and flanked by police officers from the Anti-Terrorist Squad, walking into the Supreme Court without handcuffs.
His arrest came after Facebook photographs of Mehsud, posing with long-flowing hair in trendy clothes for amateur fashion photo shoots, cast doubt on police claims that he was a hardcore Islamist.
Yesterday that Supreme Court ordered the formation of a team led by police officers to investigate the killing of Mehsud.
It has also unfrozen Anwar’s bank accounts to ensure that his children do not struggle financially, English-language Dawn newspaper said.
In January, Anwar told Reuters that he had done nothing wrong, saying that the investigation into his officers’ actions could allow the Pakistani Taliban militants to regain a foothold in ethnic Pashtun parts of Karachi.
“I had no knowledge of Naqibullah Mehsud,” Anwar said at the time. “My staff told me that he is a militant with a criminal history.”
His disappearance had fuelled speculation and conspiracy theories that he was being aided by the country’s intelligence agencies.
In court yesterday Anwar requested protective custody, but the three-member bench headed by Chief Justice Saqib Nasir ordered his arrest.
“Take Rao Anwar into custody,” the judge ordered, the Dawn newspaper said.
Anwar’s lawyer or other representatives could not be immediately reached for comment.
His name will remain on a no-fly list.
Mehsud’s father and dozens of relatives were present at the court, where the chief justice ordered them “not to harm” Anwar or threaten him “directly or indirectly”.
“Now I am hopeful that I will get justice,” Mohammad Khan Mehsud told AFP.
Karachi, a port city of some 20mn and Pakistan’s economic hub, was frequently hit by Islamist, political and ethnic violence before paramilitary forces began a sweeping crackdown in 2013.
However, rights groups have accused police and paramilitary troops of carrying out hundreds of extrajudicial killings in staged gunfights, or “encounter killings”.
Since Mehsud’s killing, the issue of “police encounters” has gained media coverage amid growing anger from the Pashtun community, which says its young men are unfairly and disproportionately targeted.
Police data from 2011 reviewed by Reuters shows that at least 450 people have been killed in 200 clashes with police that involved weapons, during the seven years that Anwar has been in charge of Karachi’s Malir district.
The data does not detail the circumstances of the shootings, but the district has a large Pashtun population.
Mehsud was shot dead along with three other people in what police say was an operation targeting Taliban insurgents on January 3.





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