Pakistan militant leader Malik Ishaq shot dead

Malik Ishaq, who directed the operations of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group, was so feared in Pakistan that some frightened judges hid their faces, while others offered court refreshments.

Malik Ishaq, leader of the banned organisation Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, pictured in Lahore in 2011. Ishaq and at least 13 other militants including two of his sons were killed in an encounter in Muzzaffargarh district, police say. Rahat Dar / EPAShow less

LAHORE // The leader of an anti-Shiite group behind some of Pakistan’s worst sectarian atrocities was killed in a shoot-out with police early yesterday along with 13 other militants.

Malik Ishaq was shot dead along with fellow Laskhar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) militants, including senior commanders, in the eastern province of Punjab.

LeJ, long seen as being close to Al Qaeda and more recently accused of developing links with ISIL, has a reputation as being one of Pakistan’s most ruthless militant groups.

The shoot-out appeared to have wiped out much of the top leadership of LeJ. The group has been a driving force in a rising tide of violence targeting Shiites, who make up about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s 200 million majority Sunni population.

As well as numerous sectarian atrocities, LeJ was also blamed for the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.

Ishaq, who had been in and out of police custody in recent years, was arrested on Saturday and was being moved when militants attacked the convoy in Muzaffargarh, a senior police official

said.

“The police retaliated and in the encounter Ishaq, his two sons and 11 others were killed, while six policemen were injured,” he said.

Punjab home minister Shuja Khanzada confirmed that Ishaq and “13 other sectarian militants including two of his sons” had been killed in the early hours of yesterday.

According to police, the shoot-out came when LeJ militants tried to free Ishaq after police had taken him to recover a cache of explosives.

A police official said all six militants in police custody were killed along with eight of the attackers, while some of the would-be rescuers fled.

Those killed reportedly included Ghulam Rasool Shah, a hardline LeJ chief who acted as the group’s leader when Ishaq – who was designated a global terrorist by the US last year – was behind bars.

Yesterday’s killings are the latest blow to militancy in Pakistan, where in the past year authorities have cracked down hard on the insurgent groups that have plagued their country for a

decade.

The offensive intensified after the Taliban slaughtered more than 130 children at a school in the north-west in December.

So-called “encounter” killings like yesterday’s incident have long aroused suspicion among rights activists in Pakistan, who accuse authorities of using them as a means of disposing of troublesome militants and criminals without going through the courts.

Pakistan’s legal system is notoriously slow and relies heavily on witness testimony rather than crime-scene evidence.

Cases against militants affiliated with groups like LeJ often collapse because there is little protection from intimidation for judges or witnesses.

Security analyst Amir Rana said that yesterday’s killings would have a “major impact” on LeJ, effectively finishing the group as a force in Punjab.

An intelligence official said that Ishaq and his cohorts had fallen foul of the powerful security

establishment by refusing to curtail their terror activities.

“The security establishment under a policy shift wanted to eliminate all terrorists and curtail extremists but Ishaq and his group did not pay any attention to this advice,” the source said.

“The authorities believed he had changed loyalties and was no more merely an anti-Shiite militant, instead that he was a tool of the forces creating unrest in Pakistan.”

There have long been accusations that the authorities have quietly tolerated LeJ, which was created from the same pool of fighters that were trained and nurtured by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US in the 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Ishaq, born in southern Punjab in 1959, joined the sectarian Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan in the 1980s but left to form LeJ in 1996 and gained notoriety for his anti-Shiite rhetoric. He was accused of masterminding dozens of attacks against Shiites.

Imprisoned in 1997 after being arrested on charges of murder, death threats and intimidation, he was freed in July 2011.

Under his leadership LeJ claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest attacks on Shiites in Pakistan’s recent history, including two suicide bombings in the south-west city of Quetta in early 2013 in which more than 180 people were killed.

* Agence France-Presse