Much has been written and said about what is perhaps the most controversial court case in Pakistan that left the country’s first elected Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, dangling from the hangman’s rope in April 1979.

Bhutto was accused by the reactionary dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq for ordering the murder of Nawab Muhammad Ahmed Kasuri (in 1974).  

Nawab was the father of lawyer and dissident member of the then ruling PPP, Ahmed Raza Kasuri. Ahmed Raza was alleged to be the intended target of the Bhutto regime’s paramilitary force, the FSF that mistakenly killed his father.  

The old dusty FIR of Kasuri’s murder not just convicted Bhutto but also sent him to the gallows

Ahmed Raza was a leading member of the left-wing National Awami Party (NAP). He joined the PPP before the 1970 election. He then went on to win a seat from Lahore on the party’s ticket.

However, after the party came into power in 1972, Raza became the head of a small dissident group within the PPP in the National Assembly. In 1974 while he was returning from a wedding with his father, their car came under attack at a traffic signal.

Raza’s father was killed and he lodged a police FIR against Prime Minister Bhutto, claiming that it was Bhutto who had ordered the attack. Later, he even entered the National Assembly with a bottle containing some of his father’s spilled blood.

In September 1977, two months after Gen Zia toppled the Bhutto regime in a military coup earlier in July, the three-year-old FIR of the Kasuri murder was dug out and used as a pretext to arrest Bhutto.

Though the police lodged the FIR, investigations into the murder could not come up with any substantial evidence to link the Prime Minister with the murder.

In September 1977, two months after Gen Zia toppled the Bhutto regime in a military coup earlier in July, the three-year-old FIR of the Kasuri murder was dug out and used as a pretext to arrest Bhutto. However, Bhutto was released after a judge, Justice KMA Samadani, found the evidence to be contradictory and incomplete.

Three days later the Zia government again arrested the ousted Prime Minister. This time the arrest was made on the testimonies given by five members of the FSF, including its head. One of the men, however turned hostile against the prosecution and accused the police and the dictatorship of ‘extracting false testimonies (from the FSF members) under torture’.

Nevertheless, the trial that ran for five months and was headed by a staunch anti-Bhutto Lahore High Court judge, Maulvi Mushtaq, sentenced Bhutto to hang.

Though enough evidence has been provided by various authors and legal experts on the controversial and lopsided nature of the trial, very few know that the act of digging out an old murder FIR lodged against Bhutto was actually done as a last-ditch effort to implicate the fallen prime minister.

The FIR was only dug out and used to jettison Bhutto’s demise after two earlier attempts to implicate him for committing ‘heinous crimes’ had failed to materialise.

In his recent book, Leaving the Left Behind, veteran leftist leader and ideologue, Jamal Naqvi (who had also turned against the Bhutto regime in the 1970s), writes that since Zia wanted to eliminate the populist Bhutto right from the outset, he had first approached Baloch nationalist leader, Attaullah Mengal, who had been persecuted and arrested by the Bhutto regime for ‘being involved in anti-state activities’ during the Balochistan Insurgency between 1973 and 1977.

Though a staunch conservative, Zia released most of the leftist Baloch nationalist leaders who had been arrested by the Bhutto government on charges of treason.

According to Naqvi, Zia met with Mengal soon after the Baloch leader’s release and told him that he (Zia) could persecute Bhutto for murder if Mengal was willing to testify against the former prime minister and accuse him for ordering the disappearance and murder of Mengal’s 24-year-old son, Asad Mengal.

Asad Mengal had allegedly been picked up in 1974 by security forces from Karachi and was never seen again.

Naqvi adds that after hearing out Zia’s proposal, Mengal declined to testify and implicate his former tormentor on any unsubstantiated charges.

After he was unable to convince Mengal, Zia decided to incriminate Bhutto for presiding over the break-up of Pakistan. He ordered his Information Ministry to conduct an interview with former military dictator, General Yahya Khan, for the state-owned Pakistan Television (PTV).

In his book, Uncensored, former General Manager of PTV’s Rawalpindi-Islamabad station, Burhanuddin Hassan, writes that in August 1977, the Zia regime ordered PTV to conduct an interview with Yahya who was living a quiet and obscure life under house arrest ever since his fall from power in December 1971 (immediately after the East Pakistan debacle and the coming into power of the Bhutto regime).

Zia wanted the interview to focus on the debacle that saw East Pakistan separating from the rest of Pakistan after a devastating Civil War. Knowing that Yahya would put all the blame on Bhutto (who had worked closely with Yahya during the crises), Zia planned to then proceed and arrest Bhutto on the charges of treason and break-up of Pakistan that he believed the interview would provide.

According to Burhanuddin Hassan, Yahya was reluctant and told him that he (Yahya) had already said what he wanted to say about the East Pakistan debacle to the Hamoodur Rehman Commission that was set-up by the Bhutto regime to investigate East Pakistan’s separation.

Though PTV was finally able to convince the former general, he fell seriously ill and was unable to give the interview. 

Thus it was only after the Mengal and Yahya ploys had failed to provide Zia a reason to entangle Bhutto in a serious case that his regime finally came up with the idea of digging out the old, dusty FIR of the Kasuri murder. 

Though initially most of Zia’s advisers were of the view that the case would not hold in a court of law, it actually went on to not only convict the former prime minister of murder, but also tragically send him to the gallows.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 6th, 2014