After the press conference she had to leave Pakistan as she was under life threat from her husband.
DAWN/The News International, KARACHI
08 January 1999, Friday, 19 Ramzan 1419
KARACHI, Jan 7: The murder case of Maulana Salahuddin has taken dramatic turn with the startling disclosures by his daughter that she suspects the involvement of her husband (Rafiq Afghan, editor of DAILY UMMAT) in the assassination of her father, who was editor of Takbeer. She called upon the government to reinvestigate the case. She also pleaded for associating her husband, Rafiq Afghan, editor of an Urdu daily, with the inquiry and added that she had decided to seek separation from her husband. Speaking to Dawn on Thursday, Saadia said she had sent a request to the interior minister a few days ago expressing her concern over the state of investigations conducted in the case. She said in her communication to the minister that the police had installed "fake" suspects. The interior minister, Chaudhry Shujaat, when contacted by Dawn, said that now the case of Maulana Salahuddin, who was murdered outside his offices in 1994, could not be re investigated as a scrutiny committee comprising the personnel of the army's judge advocate general branch, military intelligence, the ISI and the chief secretary had scrutinized the case and prepared it for its trial by a military court. Terming the move by Saadia as a "belated one", the interior minister said Rafiq Afghan could not be cited even as co-accused in the case according to the procedures being adopted in the scrutiny and disposal of cases. In her letter to the federal minister, Saadia said, she had expressed her fears that Rafiq Afghan wanted to flee the country with their two-year-old son and, therefore, his name be put on the exit control list. She said she had also written that Rafiq would be fleeing the country to either Iran or Afghanistan, alleging that he had in his possession an ID card with the fake name of Saleem, "and he must be having a passport with a fake name, as well." A few days later, Saadia said, she s***e to the interior minister who acknowledged the receipt of her letter, saying the government would definitely do something in this regard. Saadia, who, according to her, has had estranged relations with her husband ever since "he kicked me out from his house in 1997", said that her suspicions, which had now turned into a firm belief, were based on "convincing reasons". The woman claimed that the only witness and complainant in the murder case, the late Salahuddin's driver, had been coerced by her husband to identify one of the two "fake" suspects in police custody, Saleem TT. Later on, she said, the CIA police on their own brought the other "fake" suspect, Nadeem Mota, to the residence of the driver, Amjad Pervaiz, to force him to identify Nadeem as well as an assassin.
She said the management of Takbeer, headed by her, had taken a stand soon after the case was reopened following the imposition of governor's rule and had detected numerous instances of foul play in the investigations carried out by the police. She said Amjad Pervaiz volunteered to speak out the truth when he found that the magazine had already taken a stand on the issue and on the occasion of second fake identification he refused to oblige the police.
"I noticed a U-turn in the overall attitude of my husband soon after the reopening of the case as he who had ejected me from the house was now showing willingness to welcome me, which I refused," said Saadia, who was married to Rafiq Afghan in 1988. Only yesterday, she said, the witness (Amjad Pervaiz) was unofficially produced before the high-ranking police officials comprising, among others, the DIG of Karachi, at Takbeer's offices. He told them that he was shown various photographs of suspect Saleem TT by Rafiq in the latter's office "forcing" him to identify the suspect for police. Saadia claimed that in the entire course of inquiries no one from Takbeer had been approached by the law enforcement agencies since the murder. She said that the driver was approached independently and the management had never been informed about it. She said the situation suggested that the police wanted to save the real culprits involved in the conspiracy hatched to kill her father.
© The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 1999
