HYDERABAD: Notwithstan­ding the valour with which Hyderabad police fought a pitched battle with a gang of hardened criminals in Mirpurkhas on Jan 10, the death of five policemen and four bandits in the eight-hour encounter appears to be a relatively heavy price and raises serious questions over the law-enforcers’ ability to handle the situation.

If one looks at the chain of events in retrospect, one can easily reach the conclusion that the loss of lives could have been minimised. It lays bare the weaknesses on the part of police which continue to be plagued by issues of operational resources and situation-specific expertise.

Hyderabad police managed to track down Shafiq alias Chhoto Narejo and his gang who were allegedly involved in many high-profile kidnappings including that of the son of Nisar Durrani, president of the High Court Bar Association, in September last year.

Read: Five cops, including 2 SHOs, killed in Mirpurkhas shootout

Although Sindh IGP Ghulam Hyder Jamali had issued a ‘conventional’ statement after the encounter denying lack of coordination between two police ranges of Hyderabad and Mirpurkhas but Mirpurkhas police did not try to hide its frustration over being given the cold shoulder in the action against the bandits.

Hyderabad police did initially keep it secret from their counterparts but the way Mirpurkhas police disowned the entire action against the bandits and acted ‘indifferently’ could not be termed a professional conduct.

There is no doubt their complaint is justified but at the same time it leads to a serious question as to why Mirpurkhas police themselves remained unaware of the presence of such high-profile criminals living so close to them for nearly two months.

Hyderabad police had made a wrong assessment about the amount of arms and ammunition with the bandits and it cost them dearly. They had so much ammo that they succeeded in keeping police engaged for well over eight hours, admitted a police officer, who was part of the encounter.

Secondly, he said, the team was not actually aware of the exact house the bandits were residing in. “The call locator only indicates presence of a cell phone. When it beeped outside a house adjacent to the bandits’ and the police team entered it the gang was alerted and they got ready to take on the raiders.

“When police finally knocked on their door a woman opened it and pretended to be a harmless, ordinary resident of the locality. This put SIU Wahid Bux Leghari and constable Abdul Jabbar Shaikh at ease and they walked into the house without caution only to be caught off-guard,” he said.

They were hit from point-blank range and their bodies remained there in a pool of blood for several hours till the end of encounter. They were followed by Hassan Abdi and other policemen who, too, fell one after the other.

The unusual haste appears to be the main reason behind the imbroglio, considering the fact that Hyderabad SSP Irfan Baloch was on his way to Mirpurkhas when the encounter had already started while his counterpart, Usman Ghani, was not forthcoming to own the ‘mission’ for some ‘professional’ reasons.

Some police officials are of the view that the raiding team failed to capitalise much on the time factor which was on their side as well as on their own position. They had surrounded the bungalow and plugged all routes of escape but the fact that they were not familiar with the surroundings of the locality played against them.

After losing two policemen including SIP Leghari, they avoided taking more risk and adopted the wait-and-see approach, which was successfully put to use in the famous Jalal Mari operation in a village in Sanghar district in 1996 when the then SSP Sanghar and now additional IG of Quetta, Sardar Majeed Dasti, continued a siege of a gang of bandits for 23 days, ending up finally in killing three to four of them.

“The bandits’ accomplices managed to flee in that operation because police were in a disadvantageous position in knowledge of the area. But a few days later, we killed them all. All encounters have to be tackled with different strategies. I think we don’t have expertise in Sindh for such operations against unlawful combatants,” argued Sardar Majeed.

Under the standard operating procedure, when police of an area take action in the area outside their jurisdiction they need to inform the police station concerned about their arrival. But usually police avoid it for fear of ‘leakage of information’ or over suspicions someone within police ‘might be in contact with criminals’.

The same fears played behind a botched encounter which was exclusively supervised by the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee and Karachi’s Anti Violence Crime Unit on May 30, 2012, that led to the killing of noted neurosurgeon of Sindh Dr Aftab Qureshi.

The doctor who had been held hostage in a bungalow in a residential area, one of his captors and an assistant sub-inspector of AVCU were killed in the encounter.

Except for targeted killing of policemen in the city over the past couple of years, police rarely suffer such a massive damage. The Mirpurkhas encounter should serve as an eye-opener for the police hierarchy and awaken it to the need for evaluating it in a critical manner in order to avoid further loss of lives of competent police officers in such actions.

Hyderabad DIG Sanaullah Abbasi had put it rightly when he remarked over the encounter that “we did win it but after paying a heavy price”.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2015

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