If they didn't, then who killed Naqeebullah Mehsud?

I still remember the call. A student activist urged me to cover a crowd gathering outside a Karachi charity morgue, waiting to claim the body of Naqeebullah Mehsud, a young Pashtun man killed in an alleged police encounter. 

As a journalist covering Karachi’s violence, policing and security issues, for me, such extrajudicial killings were, sadly, routine. I did not know then that the death of a young man from South Waziristan would become one of those rare events that profoundly alter the country’s political conversation. 

Recently, an anti-terrorism court acquitted the final seven officers accused in the case, drawing the legal chapter to a close, following the 2023 acquittal of former Malir SSP Rao Anwar and 17 others. 

But for those of us who documented the fallout, the story was never only about one murder trial. It was the moment an everyday tragedy collided with a city inured to violence, a law-enforcement apparatus accustomed to labeling suspects militants, and a digitally connected generation of Pashtun youth challenging how they thought they were treated by the state. 

“Naqeebullah’s killing was merely the spark,” reflects Ismail Mehsud, a veteran activist who helped lead the campaign for justice. “The political fire that followed was far larger.” 

The story Karachi initially heard

On January 13, 2018, Malir police, led by SSP Rao Anwar, announced that four suspected militants tied to the Islamic State and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi had been killed in a shootout in the city’s outskirts. They claimed the men were involved in major terrorism cases, including the deadly 2014 attack on Karachi airport.

Among the dead was 27-year-old Naqeebullah, born Naseemullah, a native of South Waziristan living in Karachi with dreams of modeling. 

Karachi was no stranger to genuine bloodshed. Since the launch of the major targeted operation in September 2013, law-enforcement agencies, including the police, Rangers, and Counter-Terrorism Department, had systematically dismantled armed networks, mainly the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, losing scores of officers in the line of duty. TTP chief Mufti Noor Wali later confirmed in his writings that numerous senior commanders were indeed killed during these crackdowns. 

Yet, beneath this crackdown lay a troubling pattern. Well before Naqeebullah’s........

© Dawn Prism