On 16 October 1951, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was shot dead while addressing a public rally at Company Bagh in Rawalpindi – the ground later renamed Liaquat Bagh in his memory. His killer, a man named Syed Akbar, was shot dead at the scene within moments, by the very police guarding the stage, before anyone could ask him a single question. More than seven decades later, who ordered the assassination, and why, has never been conclusively established. It remains one of the great unresolved mysteries of Pakistan’s political history.
What makes this particular account worth returning to is where it comes from: not a historian working from archives, but a young police officer named Rasheed Malik, who was physically present at Company Bagh that afternoon, in the middle of his own district training, and who set his memory of the day down decades later as the opening chapter of his own book on crime and criminology, Jaraim aur Mujrim. It is a ground-level view of the single most consequential unsolved case in the country’s history, from someone who was close enough to help lift the Prime Minister’s body into a car.
An Ordinary Assignment
Malik was in the second year of his training, completing his district posting under DSP Najaf Khan in the Rawalpindi range. On the morning of 16 October 1951, he was ordered to help escort the Prime Minister by car from the airport, along the Mall, to Company Bagh, where Liaquat Ali Khan was due to address a public meeting of the Muslim League.
At the venue, armed police stood on both sides of the stage – facing the crowd, not scanning outward for threats, a detail that reads very differently in hindsight than it must have felt at the time. Once the Prime Minister arrived and took his seat, the SP told the young officer his services at the stage weren’t needed further, and pointed him toward the left side of the grounds instead, where more hands were wanted to manage the crowd and watch for troublemakers. He went where he was told.
“The Last Drop of Our Blood”
From his new position, he heard Liaquat Ali Khan’s voice carry across the grounds: “We will shed the last drop of our blood…” A stray, almost embarrassing thought crossed his mind at that moment – something about comparing the greatness of God to the smallness of the people invoking such lines – and he caught himself feeling faintly ashamed of it. He looked around, took out a cigarette.
Before he could light it, two gunshots rang out from the direction of the stage. His first instinct was that it might be celebratory firing, the kind that sometimes broke out at political rallies. Then a third shot followed, and more after it. His mind went somewhere darker: Pakistan was in the middle of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case at the time, with several army officers already under arrest for plotting against the government. He ran back toward the stage.
What he found was chaos. The Muslim League leadership on the stage was fleeing. So was most of the crowd. Instinctively feeling that stopping people would matter for whatever investigation followed, Malik drew his own pistol and fired a warning shot into the air. It did nothing – people kept running, crouching, crawling, scattering for cover, exactly as anyone would with gunfire in the air around them.
Near the stage, he saw the armed guards in Muslim League uniform beating someone. He pushed toward the stage itself and found an extraordinary scene: the Deputy Commissioner sitting on the stage floor with the Prime Minister’s head in his lap, the private secretary beside them, both visibly panicked, in a venue that had emptied out around them almost entirely. The officers who had fired the shots stood scattered nearby, along with a few visibly confused soldiers. The private secretary told him to get a car – immediately – and there wasn’t one anywhere near the stage.
He ran through the chaos and found a police sergeant, Bulent Nazir, and between them managed to bring a large car close to the stage. Bystanders lifted the Prime Minister into the back seat. The private secretary climbed in front beside the driver. A cabinet minister, Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani, arrived and tried to get in but couldn’t fit, and stood by the car instead. Malik, standing right next to it, signaled the driver, and the car pulled away toward the Combined Military Hospital. At that moment, nobody at the scene knew whether the Prime Minister was alive or dead. The working assumption was that he had been wounded and might survive.
“The Wretch Is Dead Too”
As the car left, DSP Najaf Khan approached from a few yards away. Malik told him the assassin had died as well, right there at the scene. Some instruction followed – possibly that the body should be moved to the police lines under guard, though decades later he could no longer be certain of the exact words. He arranged a police vehicle, had the body lifted from beside the stage, and sent it off under strict guard.
With that task finished, and no further instructions coming, he simply went home. Some time later it occurred to him that he ought to think through what he would say if asked about his own role during whatever investigation followed. His answer to himself was simple: when the time comes, I’ll tell the truth. He went looking for Najaf Khan and found he’d already left too. Eventually he learned, along with everyone else, that the Prime Minister of Pakistan had died of his wounds.
The Questions That Never Went Away
Decades on, Malik wrote that this single afternoon still churned through his mind, unresolved. Where exactly was Najaf Khan when the shots were fired? If he was near the stage, why didn’t he act? If he wasn’t, where was he, and why had he stepped away at the precise moment he – as the officer responsible for the Prime Minister’s security, alongside the DIG, who was also present – should least have been absent? Why did the security detail scatter afterward instead of securing the scene? If they were simply afraid for their own lives in the moment, that alone said something damning about their competence as police officers.
Here is the detail that turns an eyewitness memory into something closer to an indictment: the assassination of a sitting Prime Minister, and the killing of his assassin at the very same scene, were about as serious as any two incidents could be – and yet no departmental action was ever taken against a single police officer involved, and no one was ever formally held responsible for either killing. Najaf Khan, far from facing any scrutiny, was later promoted to Deputy Inspector General and retired honorably at that rank.
The assassin, Syed Akbar, was already known to police before that day – he appears to have been on an informer list connected to Hazara district police, and Rawalpindi police had reportedly been keeping an eye on him as well. Two other officers present that day, Inspector Muhammad Shah and Inspector Abrar Sheikh, both vanished from public view afterward in a way Malik found impossible not to notice: neither was ever called to testify or give an account of what he’d seen, both took retirement not long after, both were promoted shortly before leaving service, and both died within a relatively short time of retiring. Whether that pattern means anything is impossible to prove decades later – but it is exactly the kind of detail that keeps a case like this alive in public memory long after the official file goes quiet.
What actually determines guilt or innocence, Malik wrote, ought to be the full record built up in open court, not a snap judgment made in the instant a crime occurs. A court is supposed to weigh that record and hand down a sentence long enough to keep a guilty man from ever committing the same offense again, while also serving as a warning to everyone else. None of that was possible here, because the one person who could have answered every question that still lingers – who sent him, and why – was killed at the scene by the same police force that failed to prevent the assassination in the first place. Whatever did or didn’t happen in the planning of that day, the aftermath ensured Pakistan would never really know.
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