Commandant Frontier Constabulary Sifwat Ghayur
The rank of Capital City Police Officer (CCPO) is considered an administrative post and usually officers of this rank want to keep a safe distance from the field duties. That, as anyone around him would attest, was not the late Sifwat Ghayur’s style. After taking charge as CCPO Peshawar, Ghayur changed the nature of his job. And this wasn’t just a recent, heightened sense of duty. He was a restless soul from the beginning. When he joined the police, he was appointed as Assistant Superintendent Police (ASP), Banamarhi.
“I still remember when he was a young ASP,” says retired Inspector Tariq Khan, recalling the days of the early 1980s. “In those days, the standard practice of every provincial government was to ignore the police as much as possible. Every police station had only one old mobile vehicle, while the smugglers and kidnappers were using brand new cars. So Sifwat Ghayur decided to introduce the concept of night patrolling even in the suburban areas and arranged for police vehicles for patrolling despite the limited resources of police.”
“In those days a kidnapper ‘Shitan’ had gained much notoriety for his kidnapping of foreigners and he was based in the Khyber Agency. He made a lot of money and allegedly used it to earn support in the office of political agent as well as police too,” he said. When Sifwat Ghayur was appointed to the Criminal Investigation Agency (CID) and he saw a list of notorious kidnappers and murderers, he decided to ‘clear the mess’ in his own particular style. The way he finally brought Shitan to justice was like seeing a chess grandmaster as play, a strategy more elaborate than can be explained in this piece. At the CID, he used nearly all his funds for the purchase of armoured cars for his squad and equipped them with the latest weaponry. “He was of the opinion that if kidnappers could use armoured cars and anti-aircraft guns, then his boys, being a law enforcement agency, too had the right to use them. But unfortunately some people in the military started raising questions about his aims and the purchase of military weapons for police so he quit the post as protest.”
As CCPO Peshawar, he was involved in the active pursuit of militants and their supporters. “It was he who arrested the commander of Afghanistan-based militants Yahya Hijrat from Nowshera. He was later killed when militants attacked the police van and tried to release him on Ring Road but instead shot their own man,” Tariq said.
Perhaps Sifwat Ghayur was very much in his element as CCPO but the sudden discovery that he was suffering from Hepatitis C, and that it had entered the final stage, forced him to quit this post too. Sifwat Ghayur was perhaps the first and last commandant Frontier Constabulary (FC) who dared to chase militants in the far flung Frontier Region Peshawar (FR Peshawar) where they had established a firm foot-hold in the past few years. Police and FC were deployed to cordon off the vast emptiness of this semi-mountainous area in order to block all the possible routes of escape for the militants.“He was a man who really believed in the practical work rather than using empty words and issuing statements to media,” said Dilawar Khan, the former head of Adezai peace militia.
“Our men accompanied them in the operation in FR Peshawar. The arrangements were really perfect but militants were really in small number in the area and they were able to disperse into the wooded mountains silently,” he recalled, adding that even then, a dozen of militants were killed in the operation.
“I still remember when only a few militants had occupied a post on the mountain top and he ordered his men to push them back by re-occupying the position and the 950 of them declined to carry the charge by defying the order,” he said, adding that the very next day they saw in the newspapers that Sifwat Ghayur had suspended 950 FC men and that further action was underway against them. “He wanted to work hard and expected from his men, too, to follow his example. To those who did not come up to his expectations, he was a really ruthless man.”
Hawaldar Rasool Jan Frontier Constabulary (FC)
It was the night of October 15, 2012. About 80 militants, who were armed with RPG-7s and machine guns, had attacked the Ghaziabad check post of the Matani police on the outskirts of the city. Twenty-eight-year-old Rasool Khan, a head constable of Frontier Constabulary, decided to man an anti-aircraft machine gun since militants had already occupied the high ground around the check post and were inflicting great damage on the police and FC.
He was able to resist for 25 minutes but then his machine gun experienced a jam and the militants started firing at him from all directions at his position. He received several bullets. It was the late SP Khurshid (another martyr, another story) who finally reached the check post and was able to evacuate him along with other injured. But after three hours, he succumbed to his injuries at the Lady Reading Hospital (LRH) despite the hectic efforts of the doctors.
Rasool Khan was a resident of Sherikira village in the jurisdiction area of Matani police station and was an Afridi tribesman by clan. He left behind a young widow and three small children. “Being a part of a paramilitary force and living in Shirakira village where militants roam freely in the night is a very difficult situation indeed but it was Rasool Khan who was able to put the pressure aside and continue with his job by clearly opposing the militants,” said Dilawar Khan, who had developed a special bond of friendship with Rasool Khan over the years.
“It is unfortunate that Rasool Khan, a great son of the FC, fell while fighting bravely but his dead body was handed over to his family and no high ranking official dared to attend even his funeral. Even the police avoided providing security for his funeral,” he lamented, adding that the volunteers of Aman Lashkar provided security despite their limited numbers. —I.F
Assistant Sub-Inspector Tariq Khan
ASI Tariq Khan was incharge of the Safin check post of Badabher police station. And he was good at what he did. A diligent policeman, he took his sworn duties seriously. He had gone on a two-day holiday to his ancestral town, Adezai. After spending two days with his children, wife and parents, he was going to Karkhano market in his official Alto car. On his way, he saw his school fellow Chaman Gul, a school teacher in a local government school, and offered him a lift, which was happily accepted. He had not imagined that this small journey would take him to his death. And that his best childhood friend Chaman Gul would fall into thehands of the militants as a hostage, an ordeal that would last for an awful 11 months.
“He told me that he wanted to go to his tailor in Karkhano market and decided to take a shortcut, passing through Akka Khel area of Khyber Agency,” recalled Chaman Gul, adding that when they entered the Akka Khel area they saw armed men blocking the road. “They had prior information about Tariq’s movement and within no time they surrounded us. I told them that I was school teacher so my life was spared but they severely tortured Tariq and dumped his dead body in Jani Khwar (nullah) area after brutally slaughtering him.
“They were Lashkar-e-Islam (LeI) men who had complete hold of the Khyber Agency. They were particularly angry with police as 9 volunteers of the Lashker had been killed in Bazid Khel village at the hands of locals and police,” he said, adding that those 9 men had been sent to kidnap the union council nazim Fahimur Rehman. “These militants had no mercy in their hearts for the personnel of law enforcement agencies,” he claimed, adding that he himself was kept as hostage for a whole year in a militants’ camp and finally released as he had nothing to do with police. “These men knew that Tariq and other policemen were using the Akka Khel route as a shortcut and they were waiting that very moment when one of them would come to their area and be caught,” he said.
Chaman Gul still remember his friend Tariq who was his neighbour as well as class fellow in school. “He was a good man and he was targeted because of his police job only,” he observed. “Do you think that it is human to slaughter a man like a goat and put his severed head on his chest for the sake of display?” —I.F
SP Peshawar (Rural) Kalam Khan
SP Rural Kalam Khan died on March 16, 2012 in a suicide attack on his vehicle on Ring Road. He was a resident of Dir and had served as DSP in the restive Swat valley in the days when the militants had established a strong foothold there. An index of how resolute he was can be when one of his sons was kidnapped by Fazalullah’s militants but was released when Kalam declined to bargain with them for his release. In Swat, Kalam Khan also observed the militants’ tactics closely and that was why he did not consider then ‘para-normal’ like his other collegues.
“I still remember when a check post of Matani police was attacked in the night and neither SHO nor the concerend DSP was willing to rush to the check post which was short of ammunition,” recalled one of his friends, the member of Telaband peace militia, Ijaz Khan. He said that Kalam was on his way back from Islamabad and instead of going home, he rushed to the site of the attack.
“We were with him. He reached the area where police had gathered, led by the SHO, but none of them were inclined to go further, despite the fact that they were equipped with an APC as well,” he explained, adding that he told the gunman of the APC to start firing into the woods where militants were supposed to hide and himself led the police convoy in the APC. “When we reached the check post, militants had no option but to flee as they were not expecting SP Kalam would himself reach for the support of a small isolated check post in the middle of the night,” he said. —I.F
