In a mystery, the sleuth must be believably involved and emotionally invested in solving the crime. — Diane Mott Davidson

On Tuesday, 16 October, 1951, around 4 pm, the first prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was going to address a public meeting in Company Garden in Rawalpindi. As he walked to the microphone and uttered the words“Baraadaraan-i-Millat” [Brothers of the Nation], a man named Said Akbar, sitting on the ground near the dais, fired two bullets at him in rapid succession with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.

Chaos and mayhem suddenly erupted in the meeting. Khan Najaf Khan, the Deputy Superintendent of Police who had personally supervised the security arrangements, yelled in Pashto, “Who fired the shots? Shoot [him]!”. Within seconds, a police inspector, Mohammad Shah, came running with his service revolver drawn and shot Said Akbar five times at close range, in such a haphazard manner that he missed one shot altogether.

As Said Akbar was lying on the ground dying, he was also stabbed more than 26 times with spears by Muslim League volunteers. The recording equipment of Radio Pakistan was on and captured the sounds of the firing and the chaos for one minute and 13 seconds, and then fell silent. The entire shooting episode ended within 48 seconds. The recording is available online. Liaquat Ali Khan was taken to the Combined Military Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.

The assassin, Said Akbar, was my father, who had come to Rawalpindi from Abbottabad on 14 October.

One of Pakistan’s founding fathers and the country’s first prime minister was assassinated at a public gathering 74 years ago. Despite the formation of an Inquiry Commission and two other police investigations — one by Scotland Yard — until today, there has been no satisfactory closure regarding those tragic events. Now, the son of the assassin has penned his own investigation into the events in the shape of a book, which provides, for the first time ever, his family’s perspective as well as delves into the weaknesses of the official accounts and spans Pakistan’s tumultuous history — from the first war over Kashmir, the Rawalpindi Conspiracy and internal friction within the new state’s functionaries. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from The Assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan: 1947-1952 by Farooq Babrakzai, published by Vanguard Books…

INTELLIGENCE FAILURES

Neither the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) nor the police personnel had any prior knowledge of Said Akbar’s presence in Rawalpindi, let alone at the public meeting. All police and CID claims about keeping Said Akbar under surveillance in Rawalpindi for three days prior to the murder, upon close examination, turned out to be false; stories that were fabricated after the tragedy. No CID or police official was able to establish Said Akbar’s identity in the public meeting.

Soon after the incident, Inspector Abrar Ahmad went around checking hotels in Rawalpindi Saddar to see if Said Akbar had stayed in any of them, when, after two hours, he got lucky at Grand Hotel, where Said Akbar was staying. The hotel clerk immediately identified and confirmed that the body was that of Said Akbar, who was staying at the hotel. That led police to Abbottabad and, by nightfall, with the help of a few men from the neighbourhood, they arrived at Said Akbar’s home.

Said Akbar’s eldest son, 11-year-old Dilawar Khan, was with the father in Rawalpindi, and was sitting in front of him in the public meeting. He heard the shots and saw the prime minister fall. He turned around to ask father why the prime minister had fallen and what was happening and saw the chaos erupting and people attacking his father. He got scared and ran away, leaving his shoes behind.

The assassination of the prime minister was a sudden, unexpected and shocking event for Pakistan. In the days following the incident, when the police and the CID officials started to examine the circumstances of the crime, they had no prior information about the incident, no relevant intelligence reports, and no leads to follow.

COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

On 25 October 1951, the government appointed a ‘Commission of Inquiry’, consisting of Mr Justice Mohammad Munir, judge of the Federal Court, as the president, and Mr Akhtar Hussein, Financial Commissioner, Punjab, as his associate. The Commission examined 66 witnesses in 38 sessions, 23 in Lahore and 15 in Rawalpindi. Four months later, on 28 February 1952, the Commission submitted its report to the chief secretary, Government of Punjab. From the final version of the report, 73 names, clauses and sentences were omitted, mostly for security reasons. This obfuscated the report and made it look quite weak.

The Commission looked at five major factors to see if they had any bearing on the assassination. It examined at length various documents about Said Akbar, from January 1947, when he and his older brother, Mazrak Zadran, surrendered to the British authorities in North Waziristan, till October 1951.

These pertained to their detention under the Bengal Regulation III of 1818, which determined their official status, starting in British India and then in Pakistan, and records of all the places they visited in Pakistan. Nearly all of this was irrelevant to the tragedy in Rawalpindi as the Commission did not find any valuable clues in Said Akbar’s travels, his contacts with people, and his........

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