Yet another sectarian killing

Daily Times - July 15, 2006
Turabi had warned he topped sectarian hit lists
By Hasan Mansoor

KARACHI: Allama Hasan Turabi’s assassination on Friday was the first sectarian incident of its kind in which a suicide bomber was used to kill a specific individual.

Turabi was born in Shingrila in the Northern Areas in 1941 and had migrated to Karachi some 40 years ago following which he became the pesh imam of Irum Masjid in Mehmoodabad area. He also served at Habib Public School as an Islamiyat teacher for 14 years. The father of 5 sons and 8 daughters with two wives, Turabi started his career as a religious activist of the then Tehrik-e-Nafaz Jafaria Pakistan in the mid-1980s and shot to fame in 1990s when he became a leader of the TNFJ, which renamed itself as the Tehrik-e-Jafaria Pakistan (TJP).

The TJP was banned along with several other sectarian outfits five years ago and the leadership reincarnated the outfit as Tehrik-e-Islami that was also banned. However, Turabi became its president and was also elected as one of the four vice presidents of the MMA.

The Turabi attack becomes the third suicide bombing in the city this year that started with an attack near the US consulate in March in which a man in a car blew himself up to kill a US consulate official.

The Nishtar Park blast, which is officially called a suicide attack, occurred on April 11 and killed 60 people, including the top hierarchy of the Sunni Tehrik, and injured more than 100. Turabi’s killing is the third in the sequence and first with a Shia-Sunni sectarian dimension.

It was also the second attack on a Shia leader in a little over three months. Earlier on April 6 he narrowly escaped another bomb attack and had blamed the banned Sunni outfit Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). However, an SSP spokesman had denied the allegation and had condemned the incident. Qari Shafiqur Rehman, the SSP’s Karachi leader, also condemned the latest attack, which killed Turabi, and said his outfit had nothing to do with that. “We condemn the attack. It is naked terrorism,” said Qari Shafiqur Rehman, spokesman of the Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan, the reincarnated version of the proscribed SSP. The government has also banned the MIP.

“We are not involved in this and by no means would we encourage such terrorist acts. This attack is part of a conspiracy aimed at spreading lawlessness in the country,” said Rehman.

Turabi had been concerned about his life and had openly expressed his fears to the media. In February, in an interview with Daily Times, Turabi, also vice president of the six-party religious alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, had said his life was in danger and was still on the top of the hit-lists of terrorists. “My name has always been on the top of the hit-lists prepared by sectarian terrorists but I was stripped of security by the government,” Allama Hasan Turabi had told Daily Times after the provincial home department had withdrawn official guards from a large number of VIPs, including him. “I feel a permanent threat to my life but still the government has decided to withdraw the guards it had given to me for the last nine years,” Turabi had said.

On the eve of April 6, when Turabi had last escaped an attack on his life he had told this reporter that he was targeted mainly to dismember the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) and the growing harmony between the rival Shia and Sunni sects. “I would not shy away from blaming militant sectarian outfits of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi who are doing all this to appease their foreign masters,” Turabi had said.

“I have been learning from various government sources that almost all the terrorists they arrested from time to time had hit lists with my name on the top of all those dossiers.”

The provincial government had recently said that it saw no ‘major threat of sectarian terrorism’, as the organisations and individuals that could have posed any security problem had been fittingly tackled.

But Turabi’s contention was that most of those ‘terrorists’ had been released. “Not a single one of those terrorists arrested by the government has so far been hanged and their release has in fact encouraged them to attack us,” he had said.

A senior official in the home department said they were reviewing their policies about the withdrawal of guards from VVIPs, politicians and religious scholars. “We don’t think this policy was wrong because it had certainly contributed to improving the overall law and order situation in Sindh. But, we are rethinking our policy to provide cover to some persons whose lives are really in danger,” he said.