The anmol ‘crack’ down on Queen Pinky

On the morning of April 7, Karachi’s Baghdadi police were alerted to a body on a footpath near a school in Lyari. Brown shirt, checked trousers, about 25 years old, no ID. Of note was a small tin sealed in golden foil that was found on his person. It said: “Queen Medam Pinky 🖤Don 🖤Naam hi kafi hai. Enjoy.”

The Baghdadi police put the body down as Unidentified Drug Addict in the roznamcha and dispatched it to a morgue. On May 9, they registered a murder case and nominated the name on the tin: Pinky. A forensic toxicology report confirmed their suspicion a few days later that it had traces of the A-class Schedule I narcotic cocaine.

On May 12, Pinky was declared arrested.

In the official telling, Pinky was taken into custody from a flat in Karachi’s Garden on May 12 by the Sindh Police and a federal intelligence agency. Her arrest, it emerged, according to one version of events, was based on a tip-off. Pinky’s ex-husband had snitched on her to a sub-inspector in Karachi to tell him where she was hiding. The policeman, who cannot be named due to his current deputation, was ecstatic—he had been on Pinky’s case since 2019 and had once even come close. She had been dodging arrest for eight years and was thus well known to the Lahore and Karachi police, Counter-Terrorism Department and Anti-Narcotics Force as a most-wanted criminal in 28 cases involving narcotics, illegal arms and violent crimes.

The joint operation team said it found in her flat boxes of packaging material, sealed tins like the one found on the Unidentified Drug Addict, other drugs, and a 9mm pistol with ten rounds. But most importantly, it had about 1.5kg of cocaine, which is worth as much as Rs30 million—a single seizure that equaled what the police intercepted from the entire City district in the first eight months of the year.

When Medam Pinky was presented at the Judicial Complex inside Central Prison Karachi on May 17, she challenged this version of the arrest loud and clear. As she was dragged into a police van—restrained by a clutch of women police officers who struggled to cover her face with a white chador—she shouted. “These people picked me up from Lahore and brought me here 22 days ago!”

The reporters latched onto this but she theatrically parried their questions: “Hum to doobay hain sanam, in sab ko lai doobay gain.”

I may be drowning, my love, but I will take all of them down with me too.

I may be drowning, my love, but I will take all of them down with me too.

At one point in the ensuing media circus, a PDF list of 326 Karachi-based telephone numbers, supposedly from her smartphone, was reported as leaked. This news sent shivers down the city’s most expensive spines. The personal information doxxing was devastating for businessmen, journalists, bankers, and industrialists, whose CNICs........

© Dawn Prism