Exactly 38 years ago, in March 1981, a group of young men hijacked a PIA plane from the Karachi Airport and forced it to land in Kabul and then Damascus. The plane, bound for Peshawar, was hijacked on March 2, 1981 by three men who claimed to belong to an obscure left-wing urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfiqar Organisation (AZO).

The hijacking lasted 13 days. According to Raja Anwar, an author, journalist and former adviser in the Z.A. Bhutto regime (1971-77), the AZO was formed by Bhutto’s sons, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, in 1979. Anwar joined the outfit in 1980. In his 1997 book on the AZO, Anwar writes that being young, the two brothers decided to instigate a revolutionary movement against the Gen Zia dictatorship which had sent their father to the gallows in 1979 through a controversial trial.

On March 24 this year, as a response to Bilawal Bhutto’s allegations that some of the ruling party members had links with militant Islamic outfits, a prominent leader of PM Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) tweeted a newspaper image of the 1981 hijackers making victory signs and holding AK-47s. Obviously, the gentleman was pointing out the irony of Bilawal condemning the alleged links between certain PTI ministers and Islamic militants when two of his own maternal uncles were involved in masterminding a hijacking.

The case of Al Zulfikar Organisation’s Salamullah Tipu, who hijacked a PIA aircraft, offers lessons about how the young and naive are often exploited by the powerful

On the surface, this was a clever tweet, until some respondents correctly pointed out that Murtaza Bhutto, the chief of the AZO, was the father of the now famous novelist, Fatima Bhutto, who was apparently approached last year by PTI to join the party!

Secondly, Bilawal’s mother, the late Benazir Bhutto had been under arrest in Pakistan at the time of the hijacking. She was about to lead a protest movement against the Zia regime when the hijacking took place. According to Anwar, Benazir was livid. In her 1988 biography, Daughter of the East, Benazir described the hijacking as a misadventure which gave Zia the opportunity to come down hard against his political opponents.

When she became the prime minister for the first time in 1988, Benazir had a falling out with Murtaza. Many believe that the roots of this can be found in her disapproval of her brothers’ tactics vis-à-vis the AZO.

In her 2010 book, Songs of Blood and Sword, Fatima Bhutto more than alludes that the hijacking might have been the work of the Zia regime. She claims that her father, Murtaza, was convinced that one of the hijackers was being manipulated by the dictatorship. Anwar, who met with the main hijacker, Salamullah Tipu, writes that the AZO was a badly organised operation led by two angry sons out to avenge their father’s execution, and dozens of young men escaping the oppression of the dictatorship. Tipu was one such man.

Tipu has become an enigma since. Was he really manipulated by the Zia dictatorship or was he simply a reckless youth, hungry for revolutionary notoriety? The following profile of Tipu has been weaved together by accounts of him in Anwar’s book, French academic Laurent Gayer’s tome Karachi: Ordered Disorder, and my 2010 talk on the subject in London with former student activist and Tipu’s university friend, Akram Qaimkhani.

Tipu was born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class Urdu-speaking family in Karachi. His grandfather had been hanged by the British colonialists in the 1920s. A mischievous teen, his father made Tipu join the military. However, he was soon let go for misconduct. He joined a college in 1972 and immediately became a member of the Islami Jamiat Tulaba (IJT), the student-wing of the right-wing Jamaat-i-Islami. However, inspired by the ‘socialist’ rhetoric of then prime minister Z.A. Bhutto, Tipu quit the IJT and joined the left-wing National Students Front (NSF). In 1976, aged 22, he eventually joined the student-wing of Bhutto’s PPP.

Not much is known of his activities between 1976 and 1979. The Bhutto regime was toppled in a coup by Zia in 1977. According to Anwar, Tipu next enters the picture when he was made the president of Peoples Students Federation’s Karachi chapter in 1979. Gayer and Qaimkhani spoke of a ‘daring raid’ in 1980 led by Tipu on a van driven by two IJT activists. The van was full of weapons, which Tipu nicked.

In February 1981, Tipu got into a vicious gunfight at Karachi University against the IJT. An IJT member was killed. Tipu escaped to Kabul, which was, at the time, under the Soviet-backed Afghan regime. And here is where the AZO was also headquartered. Anwar writes that initial funding for the outfit came from Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Anwar writes that India refused to have anything to do with it and the Soviet KGB handed the AZO’s operations to the Afghan intelligence agency KHAD.

Tipu was impressed by the notorious South American left-wing terrorist ‘Carlos the Jackal’ — who was also known as the ‘playboy terrorist.’ Thinking himself an ‘Asian Carlos,’ Tipu returned to Karachi in March 1981 and hijacked a PIA plane with two accomplices. Both are still in exile. Anwar quotes Tipu as saying that he planned the hijacking on his own and that Murtaza only took credit for it. After the hijacking, a power struggle erupted between Murtaza and Tipu. Anwar writes that Tipu told KHAD that he was the real Marxist and Murtaza was just a feudal.

However, after often being apprehended for driving fast while drunk and harassing bystanders on Kabul roads, KHAD arrested Tipu for the murder of an Afghan national. Tipu insisted the murder was instigated by Murtaza. But in 1984, Tipu was executed by the Afghan regime. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Kabul. His parents never got to see him again.

Bilawal Bhutto’s accusations and the PTI’s counter-accusations trivialise a bigger issue: how the emotions and naiveté of young people are manipulated by those playing cynical power games. In the process, not only are young lives destroyed, but their whole families continue to suffer.

Social anthologist, Nichola Khan’s Violence, Anti-Convention and Desires — which chronicles the rise of the destructive impulse injected into the psyche of young men associated with the MQM in the 1980s and 1990s — and security analyst M. Amir Rana’s Militant Ideologies & Radicalism in Pakistan — which reproduces interviews with young men radicalised by jihadist outfits — are harrowing reminders of just how much Pakistan’s youth are still vulnerable to cynical ideological exploitation that destroy not only them but also their families.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 31st, 2019