HYDERABAD: Retired Major-General Ehsan Ahmed, a Pakistan Peoples Party-Workers (PPP-W) leader who once served as Sindh’s health minister, has called for a thorough investigation into the role of suspected Lyari gangster Uzair Baloch in the murder of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) activist Khalid Shahenshah as well as the Oct 18, 2007 Karsaz bomb attack on the rally organised to welcome the then PPP chairperson Benazir Bhutto on her return home.

Speaking at a press conference at the local press club on Monday, he said Mr Shahenshah was a bodyguard of PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari.

The retired general also demanded completion of the ongoing investigation into the assassination of Ms Bhutto, the former prime minister, and said the findings also be made public.

He claimed that the way the PPP leadership was changed had disappointed every single ideological worker of the party. “Its leaders don’t listen to party workers,” he observed.

Gen Ahmed was of the view that [PPP chairman] Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari was not yet groomed politically.

He said that the party’s founder chairman, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had taken this party to streets and lanes it had now become shrunk and confined to palaces and a few pockets of certain areas. The ideological leaders and workers, he added, dissociated themselves from the PPP’s current high command and formed the PPP-W led by Dr Safdar Abbasi and Naheed Khan.

Published in Dawn, February 2nd, 2016