Comment by Riaz Haq on November 22, 2021 at 4:57pm

Kamran Faridi — Karachi criminal who turned into FBI spy before losing it all


https://www.geo.tv/latest/383615-kamran-faridi-karachi-criminal-who...


When condemning the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s valued secret agent Kamran Faridi, 57, to seven years in jail in December 2020, Judge Cathy Seibel of New York’s Southern District Court described it as “perhaps the most difficult sentencing I have ever done.”

The judge commented that the case carried facts, “unlike anything I think most of us have ever seen”.

She had reached that conclusion after learning the startling facts of the Karachi-born spy’s history.

Faridi’s "career" had started with hustling on the rough streets of Karachi, segued into major crimes, and then swerved towards a life of dangerous undercover operations for American secret services.

He ultimately ran afoul of his handlers for issuing death threats to three former colleagues — his FBI supervisor, an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) officer, and his former FBI handler — in February 2020.

Violent origins
This correspondent reviewed court papers and spoke to Faridi, who is currently serving time in a New York jail, to piece together the extraordinary life of a man whose career in criminality started after he became associated with student politics in Karachi while still in his teens.

Faridi was born and grew up in Block 3 of Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal area. He joined the Peoples Students Federation (PSF) — the student wing of the Pakistan Peoples Party — when he was a grade-9 student at the Ali Ali School and had started hanging out at the National College, Karachi University, and NED University. Faridi eventually grew close to PSF’s Najeeb Ahmed, then a well-known student leader.

This was a time when student unions were — quite literally and violently — at war with each other. Faridi told this reporter that he started running guns and got into kidnapping for ransom, carjacking, and armed attacks.

As he lived in an area dominated by the rival Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), it soon became difficult for him to operate from home ground. Najeeb helped Faridi shift to Times Square, where he joined other PSF activists living in the apartment complex.

Local police and the Crime Investigation Department (CID; now known as the CTD) soon had arrest warrants out against Faridi. At the same time, MQM activists were hunting him down.

Aware of the danger, Faridi’s family paid off a human smuggler and arranged for him to travel to Sweden. In Sweden, however, Faridi was unable to keep a low profile and soon got into fights with the local Albanian and Bangladeshi gangs.

He was arrested a few times by local police, and in 1992, Swedish authorities blacklisted him and refused to give him a visa due to his bad conduct.

Now an illegal immigrant, Faridi went into hiding at an island, where he was allegedly helped by Greenpeace activists. A local human rights activist, according to Faridi, arranged a fake passport for him to travel to Iceland, from where he went to America and started a life in New York City.

He later moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1994 and bought a gas station in a violent neighbourhood called Bankhead Highway.

Recruitment in the FBI
According to Faridi, Atlanta police used to hustle him regularly for bribes. Fed up of their harassment, he reported them to the FBI. This is how Faridi first came into contact with the federal agency.

The FBI agents he was in contact with, Faridi claimed, told him that they would help him, but only if he would help them first. They wanted him to infiltrate a local Urdu-speaking Pakistani gang that had been causing difficulties for local law enforcement.

The FBI saw value in Faridi’s fluent command of Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi, and in 1996 he became a full-time informant and agent.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 1, 2022 at 10:56am

How Pakistan’s Most Feared Power Broker Controlled a Violent Megacity From London


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-01/altaf-hussain-ho...

Though he was born in Karachi in 1953, Hussain has always identified as a Mohajir—a term that refers to those, like his parents, who left India after partition. In Agra, about 140 miles south of Delhi, Hussain’s father had a prestigious job as a railway-station manager. In Karachi he could only find work in a textile mill, and then died when Hussain was just 13, leaving his 11 children dependent on Hussain’s brother’s civil-service salary as well as what their mother earned sewing clothes. Such downward mobility was common among Mohajirs, who were the target of discrimination by native residents of Sindh, the Pakistani state of which Karachi is the capital. Hussain was enraged by his community’s plight. He and a group of other Mohajir students founded the MQM in 1984, and Hussain gained a reputation for intense devotion to the cause. After one protest, when he was 26, he was jailed for nine months and given five lashes.

Religiously moderate and focused on reversing discriminatory measures, the MQM built a large following in Karachi, winning seats in the national and provincial parliaments. It didn’t hurt, according to UK diplomatic cables and two former Pakistani officials, that it received support from the military, which saw the party as a useful bulwark against other political factions. Although Hussain never stood for elected office, he was the inescapable face of the MQM, his portrait plastered all over the many areas it dominated.

From the beginning, the MQM’s operations went well beyond political organizing. As communal violence between ethnic Mohajirs, Sindhis, and Pashtuns worsened in the mid-1980s, Hussain urged his followers at a rally to “buy weapons and Kalashnikovs” for self-defense. “When they come to kill you,” he asked, “how will you protect yourselves?” The party set up weapons caches around Karachi, stocked with assault rifles for its large militant wing. Meanwhile, Hussain was solidifying his grip on the organization, lashing out at anyone who challenged his leadership. In a February 1991 cable, a British diplomat named Patrick Wogan described how, according to a high-level MQM contact, Hussain had the names of dissidents passed to police commanders, with instructions to “deal severely with them.” (Hussain denies ever giving instructions to injure or kill anyone).

Even the privileged came under direct threat. One elite Pakistani, who asked not to be identified due to fear of retribution, recalled angering the party by having the thieving manager of his family textile factory arrested, unaware the employee was an MQM donor. One afternoon in 1991, four men with guns forced themselves into the wealthy man’s car, driving him to a farmhouse on the edge of the city. There, they slashed him with razor blades and plunged a power drill into his legs. The MQM denied being behind the kidnapping, but when the victim’s family asked political contacts to lean on the party he was released, arriving home in clothes soaked with blood.

Comment by Riaz Haq 2 hours ago

Pakistan’s Lyari defies Bollywood’s gangland label to rise as boxing haven
Food, football and history mingle in Karachi’s oldest settlement. And a boxing coach teaches girls to defy stereotypes.


https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/5/pakistans-lyari-defies-boll...


Karachi, Pakistan – Over a few breezy winter weeks in Karachi, boxing coach Younus Qambrani sent a steady stream of WhatsApp messages from his neighbourhood of Lyari – videos, photos, old newspaper clippings that together formed an extensive archive of how he teaches girls to throw a punch.

In one of the videos, the bearded and skullcap-clad Qambrani, 60, uses the palms of his hands and ducks as his young students practice throwing their punches. The thuds of the colliding boxing gloves and the scuff of the sneakers against the concrete floor of Qambrani’s Pak-Shaheen boxing club mask the din on the street.


Outside, motorcycles speed and sputter on narrow, labyrinthine roads, past omelettes sizzling on outdoor skillets in the many bun kebab stalls that pepper the neighbourhood of nearly 950,000 people: that is the population of Amsterdam packed into about three percent of the Dutch city’s land area.

To millions of followers of Bollywood, the Indian film industry across the border, Lyari is synonymous with brutal gang warfare waged against a perpetually grey background. It is where Bollywood’s highest-grossing film of all time, Dhurandhar and its recently released sequel, Dhurandhar The Revenge are set.

The films – about a fictionalised covert mission conducted by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) on Pakistani soil – have each earned more than $100m. In the first film, an Indian spy infiltrates Lyari’s criminal underworld and neutralises threats to India’s national security. In the sequel, the same agent continues his deep-cover operation inside Pakistan’s crime networks, again moving through Lyari’s streets.


But to Lyari locals, the neighbourhood is much more than the backdrop to blood and gore: It is a melting pot of cultures and tradition, rooted in history far deeper than Bollywood has dared to explore. It has an emerging rap and hip-hop scene, launching acts such as hip hop group, Lyari Underground, and masked rapper, Eva B, onto the national stage. The neighbourhood has also earned the nickname of Mini Brazil for being Pakistan’s mecca of football.

To be sure, Lyari has had a past rife with gang violence and unrest. Armed groups held significant influence from the mid‑2000s into the early 2010s, when battles between rival syndicates were at their peak. Gangs led by figures such as Rehman Dakait and, later, Uzair Baloch – both depicted in the Dhurandhar film and its sequel – turned parts of the neighbourhood into a militarised conflict zone. At the height of the violence, human rights groups reported about 800 people killed in Karachi in a single year, many of them in and around Lyari.

In 2012, the government launched what became known as Operation Lyari, a major crackdown in which police, backed by the Sindh Rangers paramilitary force, moved against armed groups in the area. The operation, and subsequent security campaigns, dismantled the main gang hierarchies and largely ended the era of open, large‑scale gang warfare in Lyari, even if other forms of crime persisted.

But Lyari, said social anthropologist Adeem Suhail, has always been about much more than that period of violence.

“Think of Naples or Sicily in Italy, which are among the major cultural hubs of the country (food, literature, music, etc) despite having long been associated with Mafia violence,” Suhail, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania-based Franklin and Marshall College, told Al Jazeera.

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