Comment by Mehmood Malik on August 24, 2020 at 10:43am

My Indian friends(hindutva) usually have a lot to say about most things but suddenly they have gone very Very quite, maybe they have finally realised that their so called secular Country is nothing more then an ugly disgusting terrorist state.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 1, 2022 at 8:13am

Riaz Haq
8:01 AM (1 minute ago)
to me


Arif Rafiq
@ArifCRafiq
“According to ppl w/ knowledge of the investigation, as well as interview transcripts reviewed by Bloomberg…Metropolitan Police detectives believed some of the funds might have come from the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian intelligence service….”

https://twitter.com/ArifCRafiq/status/1576220454028615680?s=20&...


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How Pakistan’s Most Feared Power Broker Controlled a Violent Megacity From London
Accused of murder, money laundering, and terrorism, Altaf Hussain spent decades pulling Karachi’s strings from his British exile. Today he’s down, but not out.

ByChris Kay
September 30, 2022 at 9:30 PM PDT

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

Two Pakistani men, Kashif Khan Kamran and Mohsin Ali Syed, were watching Farooq and followed him as he left the station. When he was just a few steps from his house, Syed rushed at Farooq, holding him in place while Kamran bludgeoned his head with a brick, and then stabbed at his chest and belly. The two men dropped Farooq’s body and went straight to Heathrow Airport, where they boarded a flight to Sri Lanka. En route, Kamran made a brief call to Karachi, which Syed would later describe to police. The job was done, Syed recalled him saying.

London has seen more than its share of violence apparently motivated by faraway political vendettas. The murder still crossed a line. Eventually, British police raided a series of properties linked to the MQM, finding hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash. In addition to piles of money, in Hussain’s home they discovered what appeared to be a shopping list of guns and other weaponry, denominated, curiously, in Indian rupees. According to people with knowledge of the investigation, as well as interview transcripts reviewed by Bloomberg News, Metropolitan Police detectives believed some of the funds might have come from the Research and Analysis Wing, the Indian intelligence service–allegations that would prove explosive when aired in Pakistan. (The Indian Prime Minister’s office, to which RAW reports, didn’t respond to a request for comment; the Met declined to comment). Even if that wasn’t true, the cash was clearly of uncertain origin, and the police opened a money-laundering investigation.

The financial probe never led to prosecution, and nor was Hussain charged in connection with Farooq’s death, prompting another MP, Naz Shah, to ask the Met commissioner at a hearing whether British law enforcement was “taking the matter seriously.” The commissioner demurred, saying only that investigations were ongoing.

But events in Pakistan were beginning to turn against Hussain. In 2013 China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, had unveiled the Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion infrastructure plan across Asia and beyond. As a traditional Chinese ally, Pakistan was to receive as much as $60 billion. Spending all that money productively would require more stability in Karachi—and an MQM no longer able to bring commerce to a halt. The subsequent military crackdown, which prompted Hussain’s 2016 calls for his followers to attack TV studios, brought the party to a political nadir. Its top officials in Karachi renounced Hussain’s leadership, leaving it unclear who was really in charge: those on-the-ground bosses, or an emigré who still commanded considerable loyalty from the rank and file. The Karachi wing sought control of the party’s British assets, alleging in a lawsuit that Hussain had siphoned millions of pounds of MQM funds into his own pocket. (Hussain denied wrongdoing). Amid the infighting, the MQM won only seven seats in the 2018 national elections, its lowest total ever. Without input from Hussain, the estranged Karachi wing entered Imran Khan’s coalition government.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 1, 2022 at 8:14am

ByChris Kay
September 30, 2022 at 9:30 PM PDT

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

Hussain elaborated, rejecting every allegation in turn. Suggestions of money-laundering and funding from Indian intelligence were “all rubbish,” he said, while the cash found by police in his house was simply there for safekeeping. In particular, Hussain denied any responsibility for Farooq’s murder. The assassins had eventually been arrested in Pakistan, where they told investigators that MQM leaders had instructed them to commit the crime. Though they later recanted those statements, an Islamabad court ruled in 2020 that they’d been acting under orders from Hussain. “I don’t know them,” Hussain said sternly. Instead, he said Farooq’s death was the work of Pakistani intelligence, like so much else. (Pakistan’s military didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Hussain’s denials came just a few weeks after another incident in which someone who crossed him found himself in harm’s way. Nusrat, Hussain’s former aide, had relocated to the US in 2017 after becoming disillusioned with Hussain’s leadership, setting up a separate Mohajir advocacy group. In July of last year he traveled to Houston to give a speech. On the way back to his hotel, Nusrat’s driver suddenly slammed on the brakes. A black sport-utility vehicle had pulled up. Someone inside fired several rounds before speeding away. Nusrat was unharmed. He wasn’t sure if the gunman missed, or if the shots were meant only to serve as a warning.

Hussain’s terrorism trial began in January at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court in southwest London. There, prosecutors played the jury enraged speeches Hussain had delivered before the TV station attacks, and presented transcripts of his agitated discussions with MQM comrades, captured by a system the party used to record phone calls. In his closing statements, prosecutor Mark Heywood argued the evidence showed that what Hussain “asked and commanded were acts of terrorism.” Hussain’s lawyer, Rupert Bowers, asked the jury to evaluate Hussain’s words with the “yardstick” of Pakistan’s violent political culture, pointing out that his client had apologized for what ensued. Hussain, he said, “intended no serious violence to come from his speeches at all.” After deliberating for three days, a majority of jurors agreed that Hussain wasn’t guilty. He emerged jubilantly from the courthouse, blowing kisses to the small crowd of supporters.

BRITAIN-PAKISTAN-MQM-TRIAL
Hussain arrives at Kingston Crown Court on Jan. 31.Photographer: Niklas Halle’n/AFP/Getty Images
With another court battle just a month or so away—this time a civil suit brought by some of his erstwhile MQM allies—Hussain’s future still looks bleak. Riven by infighting and under pressure from the army, the party that once dominated the economic heart of Pakistan appears severely weakened. But the MQM has bounced back before. In April, Hussain’s London faction tentatively revived its operations in Karachi, naming two Pakistan-based leaders to serve as his lieutenants. A supporter is also petitioning a Pakistani court to remove the ban on his speeches.

Before climbing into a chauffeured Range Rover to drive home from court, Hussain made clear that he wasn’t finished trying to shape events in the city of his birth. “Inflation has skyrocketed,” he declared, with poor Pakistanis unable to afford fuel or electricity. “Today, I call upon all the institutions as well as the politicians of Pakistan that, for God’s sake, think about the poor people.”–with Ismail Dilawar

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 1, 2022 at 10:58am

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.

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