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| February 5, 2002 | Tuesday | Ziqa’ad 21, 1422 |
Hashim Qadeer a proclaimed offender
MULTAN, Feb 4: One of the prime suspects in the Daniel Pearl kidnap case, Syed Hashim Qadeer Shah, has been declared a proclaimed offender in a dacoity incident.
According to information collected through various official and non-official sources in Bahawalpur, Hashim alias Arif had been involved in criminal activities in Yazman and Ahmadpur East areas. He was declared a proclaimed offender in a motorcycle-snatching case registered by the Yazman police. He was also nominated in a murder case in 1999. However, he was exonerated of the accusation.
“Rightly or wrongly, Hashim was exonerated in the murder case,” a senior police official told Dawn on the request of anonymity.
However, earlier reports that Hashim had not been seen in Ahmadpur for the last three years proved false as, according to police investigations, he visited the area about five months ago.
According to Karachi police, Hashim was among the people whom the American journalist had been in contact with before his kidnap some 12 days ago.
On the Karachi police request, when the Bahawalpur police went to get information about Hashim from his native Ahmadpur East his family was offering fateha for him without receiving his body.
“A commander of Harkatul Mujahideen has told us from Islamabad by telephone that your son has martyred on a foreign front,” his father Syed Qadeer Shah told the police party.
Qadeer Shah runs a seminary and a mosque at Abbasia Chowk in Ahmadpur East. However, his general reputation in the area is not of an extremist. It is learnt that Hashim Shah did not enjoy cordial relations with his father for being a criminal and a religious extremist.
People told Dawn that he often boasted that he had fought for Islam on various foreign fronts, including Afghanistan, where he joined the Taliban force. He had been a member of Jamaat-i-Islami’s Harkatul Ansar. Later on, he started rubbing shoulder with the militants of Jaish Muhammad of Maulana Masood Azhar, who has a great influence in the extremist religious circles of Bahawalpur. He was a frequent visitor to Rawalpindi/Islamabad.
But his alleged role in the ‘Pearl kidnap case’ shows that he was in the country last month after the Afghan war was over. His involvement in other venture or martyrdom seems a distant reality in recent times of enormous pressure on the country’s Kashmir policy.
When contacted, Bahawalpur police chief Sikandar Hayat said Hashim’s family was also in a state of indecision over the fate of their son. He said the people who informed his family about his death told them that his body would reach after three or four days. But it had not happened so far, he added.
When asked why the Bahawalpur police were not investigating the mystery of Hashim’s death, he said they were just asked to get information about Hashim by the Karachi police which they promptly did. “Its up to Karachi police to decide to give us a role in investigations or not,” he said.
People in Ahmadpur East claimed that Hashim used to move in Suzuki Carry with a lot of sophisticated arms in it.
Last time he was seen in a double cabin Toyota in Ahmadpur was about five months ago, a police source claimed.
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