An anti-terrorism court in Karachi has acquitted the last seven suspects in the killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud, closing out a case that began with a staged police encounter in 2018 and became a rallying point for Pakistan’s Pashtun rights movement.
With Friday’s verdict, all 25 people ever charged over Mehsud’s death have now walked free. The court ruled that prosecutors had failed to produce a single witness who could establish that the encounter said to have killed him was staged, according to The Nation.
A killing that sparked a movement
Naqeebullah Mehsud was a 27 year old Pashtun laborer and aspiring model who had recently opened a garment shop in Karachi when police picked him up in January 2018. Officers under then Malir SSP Rao Anwar held him for days before killing him and three others, initially describing the deaths as a shootout with militants.
A government inquiry later found the encounter had been fabricated and that Mehsud had no militant history or ties to any banned group. The same inquiry documented that Anwar’s unit had carried out 745 encounters between 2011 and 2018 resulting in 444 deaths, without a single police officer being injured, a record that fed long-standing suspicions about staged killings in Karachi.
The findings triggered protests in Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar and Quetta, and helped launch the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), which has since built a national campaign around demands for accountability for extrajudicial killings blamed on security forces in the former tribal districts.
Seven years, twenty five acquittals
The seven suspects cleared this week include former station house officer Amanullah Marwat and an officer identified as the alleged shooter, along with five other accused, ARY News reported. Defense lawyers argued the prosecution never called a single witness to testify that the encounter was staged, and the court agreed the evidence fell short.
That outcome follows the same pattern set in January 2023, when Rao Anwar and 17 other police personnel were acquitted by the same Karachi court. Seven additional officials, including Marwat, had been absconders at that point and only surrendered to face trial after the earlier verdict was handed down.
A key prosecution witness also retracted his statement in 2024, telling the court he had been coerced into testifying, further weakening a case that rights advocates had already flagged as fragile.
A verdict with a familiar ring
The 2023 acquittal of Rao Anwar drew sharp criticism from lawyers and rights campaigners who argued the case exposed deep flaws in how Pakistan prosecutes its own security forces. Human rights campaigner Rimmel Mohydin called that verdict “an affront to human rights, the law and the family members” of the victims, Dawn reported at the time.
Researcher Zoha Waseem, writing after the same ruling, pointed to witness intimidation and prolonged court delays as symptoms of wider dysfunction, warning that acquittals in high profile cases risk emboldening further police violence. This week’s outcome, clearing the remaining defendants on identical evidentiary grounds, suggests those warnings went unheeded.
Why it matters
The case’s final collapse lands at a sensitive moment for Pakistan’s civil-military relations, with PTM leaders continuing to cite Mehsud’s killing as proof that police and security personnel face little consequence for extrajudicial killings, particularly against ethnic Pashtuns from the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
For Wire Examiner’s readers, the verdict is a stark illustration of how difficult it remains to secure convictions in Pakistan’s most closely watched police accountability cases, even when a government’s own inquiry had already concluded the underlying encounter was staged. None of the 25 people charged over an eight year old case that drew national attention and international scrutiny will spend a day in prison over it.
Mehsud’s family has previously signaled they intend to challenge acquittals through Pakistan’s appellate courts, though no fresh appeal had been filed as of this report. His killing continues to be cited in human rights reporting on Pakistan as a benchmark case for police impunity, a status unlikely to change now that every defendant named in it has been cleared.
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