The Story of Al-Zulfiqar

The execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto at the hands of the then military junta was a watershed in the political history of Pakistan. Bhutto’s young and impetuous sons who were mere students at the time, decided to confront the mighty Pakistan Army head-on, and Al-Zulfiqar exploded on the media nationally and internationally in 1981 when a Peshawar bound PIA plane was hijacked and commandeered to Kabul. This was done by Salamullah Tipu and his companions, a dashing young man with a magnificent curled up mustache who had been shown around a commercial plane’s cockpit by none other than Murtaza Bhutto himself at Kabul airport a few months prior to the hijacking, with precisely a future hijacking operation in mind. The Soviet-backed Kabul administration was understandably friendly and sympathetic to such causes, meant to hurt the Pakistan military which was considered to be a staunch ally of the United States.

Tipu, like an obedient and highly motivated pupil, memorized the plane’s controls well and executed the hijacking perfectly. The Zia regime, rattled, had to free 54 PPP activists detained in various prisons across Pakistan.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, from his death cell had commanded his sons to avenge his assassination. The sons, seething with the overpowering emotions of vengeance went about fulfilling their father’s dying wish more in letter than in spirit. Mir Murtaza Bhutto, being the operational and political boss of Al-Zulfiqar, emboldened by the successful hijacking operation, had started to assume the airs of contemporary Arab revolutionaries like Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddhafi, so much so that soon thereafter he was issuing execution orders for those who fell foul of his policies and that too on flimsy charges, writes Asif Butt in “Sar-e-rah Kai Sooliyan Thee”. Butt was one of the PPP activists freed by Zia post the hijacking.

Life in Kabul revolved around rudimentary military training only for a few hours a day. Rest of the time was spent watching Indian movies in the Kabul cinemas. Asif Butt throws some light on his personal life when in the then liberal city of Kabul he fell in love with a Dari speaking girl only to leave for Pakistan later, leaving her broken-hearted.

[quote]The task of this motley crew was to assassinate general Zia[/quote]

Some able-bodied trainees, apart from a few who were highly unsuitable for the rigours of an armed struggle were chosen and flown to Kabul to be trained in the most unprofessional, even laughable manner in the weeks and months to follow. The task of this motley crew was to assassinate general Zia. The plan sounds all the more fantastic and unworkable not only on account of the fact that Zia was the most closely guarded human being in Pakistan but also due to the near impossibility of crossing the Durand Line alive for Murtaza’s rag tag army. Like typical university undergraduates (Shahnawaz was at school when his father was hanged) who had found themselves at the center of revolutionary insurgency, the Bhutto brothers were blissfully oblivious of the dangers of trekking into Pakistan via the lawless and merciless hills and mountains of Southern Afghanistan. The trek from Jalalabad to Torkham was fraught with the ever looming possibility of death at the hands of the mujahideen who preyed on “collaborators” of the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.

[quote]Butt maintains that the plan to hijack a state-owned plane was the brainchild of Mir Murtaza[/quote]

Fatima Bhutto, Murtaza’s daughter, who was born a year or so after the 1981 hijacking, is at pains to paint the incident as an ISI conspiracy to malign her late father in her book “Songs of Blood and Tears”. Butt, on the other hand, maintains that the plan to hijack a state-owned plane was the brainchild of Mir Murtaza and the shooting of Major Tariq Rahim was also ordered by him as, being Bhutto’s ADC at the time of military takeover in 1977, he was suspected of being in collusion with the generals. When TV cameras recorded the footage of Tipu making a “V” sign after having pushed the bleeding and lifeless bulk of major Rahim onto the tarmac, crushing his skull and bones, Murtaza was furiously punching the air with his fist in triumphant jubilation inside the terminal building, unrecorded by the cameras. Their gestures were meant for each other, writes Asif Butt.

Hopelessly undertrained and not even close to being in perfect state of preparedness, Butt and his comrades after having miraculously reached Pakistan in one piece, staged a daring assault on Zia’s plane from the Rawalpindi rooftop of a house they had rented because it was conveniently in the flight path of Zia’s presidential plane. As expected, the missile missed and the ensuing crackdown on Al-Zulfiqar sent many behind bars. Some, including Asif Butt were sentenced to death by summary military courts. Many unsuspecting PPP workers and sympathizers who happened to even allow their Al Zulfiqar friends a few nights’ stay and a few meals were also picked up, detained without trial and brutally tortured in the notorious torture chambers of the Mughal Fort in Lahore for years, leaving permanent mental scars on their persons. Two examples come to mind – the late Mian Jahangir and Chaudhry Ishaq, both lawyers at the Lahore High Court and both die- hard Bhuttoists - who were subjected to torture and inhuman treatment in the Lahore Fort and who, over many sittings and endless cups of tea, were gracious enough to reluctantly recount only the gist of their horrors to me.

The story of Al-Zulfiqar ended with violence and shedding of blood as it had started in a similar fashion on a cold Kabul evening in March 1981. Murtaza Bhutto was brutally gunned down on 20 September 1994 outside his home in Karachi at a time when his sister was the sitting PM of Pakistan. Asif Butt and many others are convinced that under cover of the bickering between Benazir and Murtaza being played out in public, Major Tariq Rahim’s murder was avenged by the military establishment.

Tariq Bashir is a Lahore based lawyer and can be contacted on bashirtariq33@yahoo.co.uk . Follow him on twitter @Tariq_Bashir