An anti-terrorism court in Pakistan on Monday acquitted all the accused in the murder of Naqibullah Mehsud, five years after he was shot dead in Karachi, a case that led to allegations of brutality by security forces.
The court said in its ruling that the prosecution had failed to present evidence to support the charges against the suspects, who include former police superintendent Rao Anuar, Pakistan’s Geo TV reported.
Activist and lawyer Yibran Nasir has criticized the ruling and spoke of a «travesty of justice.» «No surprise in a system where all institutions rot like a corpse,» he has argued on his account on the social network Twitter.
For his part, Anuar has denounced after the verdict that «false accusations» were brought against him and has stressed that a total of 25 people were wrongly charged, while denouncing that the agents killed a terrorist named Nasimullah.
«He was a wanted militiaman about whom notices were published, even in newspapers,» he said, before opening the door to his return to office. «I would like to serve Karachi. I liberated Karachi from many cruel people,» he stressed.
Mehsud was killed in January 2018 in controversial circumstances, amid allegations that officers had murdered him and presented him as a suspected militiaman of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) armed group–known as the Pakistani Taliban–.
The TTP itself later issued a statement saying that Mehsud was not a member of the group and had no ties to them and stressing that the claims were «baseless».
Likewise, Police data released in 2018 indicated that the unit headed by Anwar is responsible for the deaths of 444 people between 2011 and 2018, in a total of 745 «incidents» that all ended without officer casualties.
Mehsud’s murder also unleashed a wave of protests against the impunity with which the police act, especially in the region of South Waziristan (north), where the young man was born, where the Pashtun community denounced persecution by the authorities.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
