Naqvi to Lifschultz
MB Naqvi On e-mail
(Below is the text of a letter written to American journalist Lawrence Lifschultz by Pakistani journalist and The Daily Star columnist MB Naqvi, following the recent publication of Mr Lifschultz's four-part article in The Daily Star on the events of August 1975. We have obtained Mr Naqvi's permission to reprint the letter for the benefit of our readers.)Dear Lawrence,
We have not met in ages now, though we used to meet more frequently earlier. I have been an interested reader and admirer of your writings largely because I share most of your conclusions. With regard to the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, I carry a two penny worth of secret. I thought I will let you in on it. I was in Islamabad on August 15, 1975. I was in a meeting with the Director General of Radio Pakistan, who was a senior civil servant and a member of the Afghan Cell in the government of Pakistan. The meeting was attended by Ijlal Haider Zaidi, then Director General of Radio Pakistan, late Sardar Hussain Ansari, Director of News and MB Naqvi, who for a brief five year period was the Controller of Current Affairs in the Radio set up. The DG had called the meeting early in the morning. He instructed that there should be a hotline from the Central Newsroom to the Director General. He was expecting an important news and wanted to hear sentence by sentence as it came over the ticker. The meeting began with gossip and comment on various current politics and other small talk. No serious organisational or operational matter was discussed. The DG obviously had something on his mind. About three or four times he was forced to ask Ansari to ask his department whether any important news has come. The meeting went on interminably, doing nothing but talking whatever came to anyone's head. At long last around somewhere between 12:00 hours and 12:30 hours came the ring from Newsroom: Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had been assassinated by Bangladesh Army officers. That was the flash. One sensed that after that news bit, a sigh of relief escaped from Ijlal Haider; he certainly seemed relieved. Perhaps it was what he was expecting. He abruptly called the meeting off and left the office- I seem to remember straight to the Prime Minister House presumably to inform him of the news. The conclusion I drew then and now is that whatever conspiracy there was in Dacca, Islamabad knew of it. Ijlal Haider Zaidi was no ordinary bureaucrat. He was a member of the Afghan Cell. The Cell was sort of clearing house for intelligence and policy making vis-à-vis Afghanistan. Several countries' intelligence agencies were active and were centred on Peshawar. To my knowledge they were British, American, and of course, Pakistani agencies. And that was the time when Pakistanis were thick in planning to assemble the Seven Sisters: the seven religious Islamic parties of Afghanistan that Pakistan recognised. First two of the top leadership of those parties, Gulbadin Hekmatyar and the first President of the post Najeeb Afghan government's President- Mujaddadi had come and began living in Peshawar by October 1975. I thought I should share with you this small bit of information also. I leave it to you to speculate how people connected with top echelons of intelligence could expect on the particular date a particular news. Obviously, there was some link and information was being shared.
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