By Shahid Saeed
Shahid Saeed retraces the circumstances surrounding the assassination in 1951 of Pakistan's first Prime Minister
Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan landed at Chaklala some 30 minutes before noon on October 16, 1951. He was going to address a rally at Company Bagh in Rawalpindi, though he was not received by the two cabinet ministers who were already present in the city.
After a thunderous reception from a crowd of over 100,000, and cheers that lasted for over five minutes, Liaquat started his address (it was 4:10 pm) and had only uttered the words “Braadran-e-Millat” (brothers in Islam), when two shots took him down. Nawab Siddiq Ali Khan, Political Secretary to the Prime Minister, rushed and took him in his arms, while the others on the stage took cover.
The assassin, wrapped in a blanket and sitting in the front row, was immediately grabbed by the crowd.
A 60-year old butcher called Lal Din and a Railway janitor called Islam Din tackled the assassin because they had been sitting next to him. As the assassin, whose name was Saed Akbar, tried to escape, Lal Din grabbed him by the leg. Saed Akbar fired another shot from his Mauser pistol and it injured Constable Bahadur Khan of district security staff. Soon a crowd had overpowered the assailant. Chief Organizer Chaudhry Maula Dad “tried to snatch the revolver from the culprit” while Head Constable Chan Pir Shah “fired at the culprit on instructions given by the superintended of police”. Constable Lal Mohammad heard SP Khan Najaf Khan shout in Pashto: “Da cha daza? Ooka ula.” (‘Who fired? Shoot him.’) But Sheikh Muhammad Umar, President City Muslim League, “shouted that the murderer should not be killed.” Reserve Guard indiscriminately fired in the air to disperse the crowd while Sub-Inspector Mohammad Shah (sometimes mentioned as Shah Mohammad) came running from thirteen yards away and shot five times at assassin Saed Akbar from point blank range. By now Akbar was well under control. 26 seconds after he shot at the Prime Minister, he was dead. In all there would be 26 wounds on his body, including bullet wounds, and the crowd would stab him, pierce him with spears, break one of his arms and even gouge his eyes.
Meanwhile, Dr Ansar of Civil Hospital rushed to the stage, undid the prime minister’s achkan and tried to provide CPR. Liaquat was able to recite the kalima and could only utter, “Mujhay goli lagi hai, May God Save Pakistan”, before losing consciousness. He was rushed to CMH Rawalpindi in the car of Mushtaq Ahmed Guramni, who had reached Company Bagh after hearing of the incident. At the hospital an operation and emergency blood transfusion was performed by Col Sarwar and Col Mian, but Liaquat succumbed to his injuries at 4:50 pm.
The very next day, an official proclamation from the government described the assailant as “Saed Akbar, son of Babrak, caste Aparkhel Jadran, an Afghan national… After search from his body currency notes worth Rs 2,040 were recovered. About Rs 10,000 were also recovered from the house where he was staying at Abbotabad. The recovery of this huge sum of money suggests that Saed Akbar Khan was in all probability a hired assassin.”
Saed Akbar had even brought his 11-year old son, Dilawar Khan, to the address but the child managed to vanish and run away to Abbotabad soon after the incident.
The government quickly constituted an enquiry commission headed by Justice Munir, who was assisted by Financial Commissioner of West Pakistan Akhtar Hussain. The commission would conduct 38 sittings and examine 89 witnesses over the next year and release its report on August 17, 1952. However, a large part of the testimonies were never made public and the Crime Investigation Department (CID) harassed some witnesses who appeared before the commission. Justice Munir even rebuked the CID and said that he might have to shift his court to Lahore in case this harassment continued.
But even the very act of instituting a government-appointment enquiry commission raised questions. The editorial of the Calcutta Standard of October 24, 1951 noted: “It cannot be believed that the Intelligence Branch of the Police, trained so carefully by the British bureaucracy for half a century, has deteriorated in Pakistan in the short course of four years that it can no longer be trusted with the investigation of a serious political crime.” As it so happens, Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan had reservations about the constitution of this commission and sensed ulterior motives.
Here are some facts about the assassination:
On the day of Liaquat’s last address, Sardar Azim Ahmed Khan, General Secretary of the City Muslim League, and District Magistrate James D Hardy had an argument which Khan won, with Hardy agreeing to withdraw police from around the dais. The man who was responsible for ‘shepharding’ people to the ground for the address testified that Saed Akbar arrived with his son and two other people, wanted to have one of the chairs on the dais and said he was willing to pay for it. When he was told that the chairs were not for the general public, he settled down in the front row.
Liaquat Ali Khan’s chair was placed prominently front of all chairs and the distance between the first row and dais was just six feet. Was this normal? Or was it part of a larger, more sinister plan? It has been stated that Liaquat personally preferred this kind of intimate seating arrangement, though no evidence has been presented to support this claim.
As for the assassin:
29-year old Saed Akbar had shifted to Abbotabad in 1946-7 with his brother Murdak after their father led a failed uprising against the Afghan government and was expelled with his family from the country. The brothers fought against the Afghan government at Almara Fort in 1944, and were later given British government protection and a pension like many other Afghan rebels of the time. This pension continued after Independence and at the time of the assassination Akbar was receiving 450 rupees per month from the government. In fact on June 6 and July 24 1951, a transmission from Radio Pakistan’s Peshawar branch named the two brothers and four others as leaders who had offered their services to fight the king of Afghanistan. This suggests that the state intended to keep Akbar and his ilk under tabs and use them against Afghanistan (and possibly other sources of “trouble”) when the need arose.
The Mazloom Duniyaand Shahbaz of Peshawar of October 20 and 24, 1951 noted that Akbar was suspected of killing six Afghan soldiers at a border post earlier that year. Moreover, he had contested a central assembly seat against Dr Khan Sahib’s son Abdul Ghani, which challenges the idea that he was considered an Afghan national by the government. 18 months before Liaquat’s assassination, Akbar had been jailed for six months for undisclosed reasons, but his pension had still not been discontinued. He was still getting the stipend of a political refugee while being under CID surveillance. The large amount of money recovered from him after Liaquat’s murder suggested that he had plans to slip away.
(Interestingy, Jamna Das Akhtar, who wrote ‘Political Conspiracies in Pakistan’, later visited Saed Akbar’s ancestral village Almara, where locals praised him as a martyr and nationalist poets wrote poems in his memory.)
On October 13, Saed Akbar informed the police on a chit that he was going to Rawalpindi (he was supposed to report to the police every time he left the city limits). The CID of Frontier police relayed this information to Rawalpindi officials on wireless. (The police later admitted before the enquiry commission that a CID Inspector had been assigned to watch over Saed Akbar.)
In Rawalpindi Akbar checked into the Grand Pakistan Hotel and registered himself in the register as a CID employee “on CID duty” and told others that he was a CID pensioner. Gul Bahadur Shah, a clerk at the hotel, told the commission that Saed Akbar was being shadowed by a CID man when he left the hotel at 2pm on October 16, 1951 [this is in contradiction to another account that places Saed Akbar at Company Bagh at noon]. Akbar’s son Dilawar Khan told the enquiry commission that on October 14 a Pathan had come to meet Saed Akbar but was never tracked down by the police.
The owner of the hotel, a Khaksar named Allah Dad Khan, was arrested a few weeks before the incident without charge and released after some days. He informed the CID that a suspicious man claiming to be from the CID had come to stay. Why the CID did not arrest him for impersonation when the hotel owner had notified them remains a mystery. As noted earlier, Akbar’s movements were under the official surveillance of the CID, but he managed to slip away the day before the assassination and despite the fact that he was sitting in the front row at Company Bagh, the CID did not identify or locate him.
While the hotel clerk noted that he had left around 2 pm, a report in Daily Afaq of Lahore of October 28, 1951 noted that “on the fateful day, Saed Akbar was seen helping Muslim League workers in making arrangements for the meeting. Police found a copy of a local newspaper, Parwaz-e-Jadeed, in his room. He had been working with the organizers since noon that day. He had brought a box of pineapple which he shared with a member of the Muslim League National Guard and he later sat down with thirteen other people in the first row, just in front of the dais. They had been sitting there since 1:10pm.”
After the enquiry commission was set up, Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan accused it of blocking the investigation and instead wasting time on the denials of police officers. The police investigation was later headed by IG Special Police Establishment (a federal entity that was later succeeded by the FIA) Nawbazada Mirza Aitizazuddin, who by various accounts had confided to Begum Rana Liaquat that he had discovered the hands of conspirators. Ominously, the plane carrying him from Lahore to Peshawar crashed in the Khewra salt range on August 26, 1952. The Air Investigation Board’s report about this “accident” was never made public. All documents pertaining to the investigation of Liaquat’s assassination were burnt in the crash, and the case came to a convenient standstill.
Later, Prime Minister Bogra told the press on January 1, 1954 that the government was thinking about hiring the services of the American FBI to investigate the assassination. That help was never sought but in November, CWE Uren, a retired Scotland Yard investigator, was hired. However, Uren recorded no testimonies and in his 65 page report submitted six months later deduced that it was the work of a lone fanatic. It was alleged in the newspapers that Bogra’s desire to hire the FBI had been thwarted by powerful quarters.
Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan in a conversation with Jamna Das Akhtar said: “I can tell you on oath that Ghulam Mohammad and Abdul Qayyum are the real villains of this ghastly drama… At least a dozen others, including another member of the Cabinet and some officials, were members of a gang which conspired this murder and washed off the traces of this conspiracy.” It is on record that Qayyum had visited Hazara between September 23 and 28, weeks before the assassination, and it is alleged that he had met Saed Akbar at there as well.
Prominent government officials present in Rawalpindi who did not attend the public address included Finance Minister Ghulam Mohammad, Minister for Kashmir Affairs Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani and Finance Secretary Mohammad Ali Bogra. It must be remembered here that Karachi was the capital in those days and it would be expected that the ministers present in Rawalpindi would have joined the Prime Minister for his speech. It is these three towards whom most fingers are raised. They had much to gain by the removal of Liaquat, with whom they had fought bitter political turf wars.
Attorney General Chaudhary Nazir Ahmed later said: “Saed Akbar did not murder the Prime Minister on his own accord. He was just a tool in the hands of the conspirators.” To Nazir Ahmed is attributed the story that Liaquat was going to announce changes in foreign policy and his cabinet.
Ghulam Muhammad, Gurmani, the nexus of the landed elite of the Punjab Muslim League and the civil-military bureaucracy together gained the most from the elimination of Liaquat, whose slow disillusionment with the prospect of joining the US in defence pacts became discernible in the last few months of his life. Any hopes of a non-aligned foreign policy were dashed with his assassination, after which Pakistan entered the US bloc hook, line and sinker. Politicians who believed in a democratic dispensation of the state were sidelined and the ones who could collude with the rising power of the civil-military bureaucracy were allowed to stick around for short stints until 1958, when the final nail in democracy’s coffin was struck.
Liaquat Ali Khan died wearing patched-up socks and clothes and with little money in his bank account. To this day we have no conclusive answers about the motives behind the assassination. Everything, however, suggests that Saed Akbar was not acting on his own. All possible lone wolf motivation theories, including dislike for Liaquat’s Kashmir policy and religious fanaticism (ostensibly instigated by a view that Liaquat was not doing enough to establish an Islamic state), were flimsy and more or less rejected by the first enquiry commission. The assassin, the man who shot the assassin and the man who was investigating the assassination all died under mysterious circumstances. The security at the venue was deliberately weak and all evidence of the investigations would soon disappear, never to be scrutinized publicly. n
Shahid Saeed, a student, is interested in Pakistani history and politics. He can be reached at shahidlive.com.pk
