ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Tuesday, acquitted Abdul Rehman ‘Bhola’ and Zubair ‘Charya’ in the case involving the Baldia Town factory fire incident, setting aside death penalties that two courts had awarded them in what was one of the most heinous mass killings in the country’s history.
The three-judge bench, led by Justice Shahzad Malik, admitted the appeals filed by the two and annulled the convictions against them. The court further rejected a MQM petition to annul certain judicial remarks, noting that the annulment of the previous decision made the remarks irrelevant.
This brings an end to the prosecution against the only two people who have ever been convicted for the case, which resulted in the deaths of more than 260 workers.
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On September 11, 2012, a fire broke out at the Ali Enterprises clothing factory in Karachi’s Baldia Town. According to eyewitness accounts, workers ran for their lives and died after being unable to escape due to locked factory gates. The factory did not have any doors for escape, had grills on its windows, and no access to the basement.
Investigators eventually established the fire was no accident. A Joint Investigation Team found that arsonists used highly inflammable chemicals to torch the factory, and that the attack was ordered after owners of Ali Enterprises refused to pay Rs200 million in protection money. The JIT named Hammad Siddiqui, then head of MQM’s Karachi Tanzeemi Committee, as the main architect of the attack. Bhola, the party’s Baldia Town sector in-charge, served as the frontman who approached the Bhaila family with the extortion demand. Zubair Charya, a factory employee with party links, allegedly threw chemicals into the basement warehouse at around 6:30pm and fled.
Bhola was arrested in Bangkok by Interpol in December 2016 and had confessed to deliberately setting the fire on Siddiqui’s instructions. Hammad Siddiqui, identified by the JIT as the principal accused, remained abroad and faced no conviction.
Bhola and Charya have been found guilty of eleven charges by an antiterrorism court in September 2020, who awarded capital punishment for two of those charges while awarding life imprisonment for three other charges while sentencing them for ten years, seven years, and two years for the remaining five charges, respectively. In September 2023, the Sindh High Court upheld their sentences by dismissing their petitions in a forty-six-page ruling.
Defence lawyers had long been claiming that their accused clients were just small fry compared to the accused who was more powerful and was let off while they were being tried. The prosecution did not challenge the acquittal orders for Rauf Siddiqui, who was then the commerce and industries minister, and three others. The SHC itself, at an earlier stage, warned it might take notice if influential accused were being deliberately shielded.
German retailer KiK, which sourced the bulk of the factory’s output, paid over $6 million in compensation to victims’ families the most tangible relief the bereaved ever received. No senior political figure spent a day in prison over the carnage.
Tuesday’s ruling leaves the families of 260 dead workers with no one convicted, no sentence in force, and the man the JIT named as the mastermind still at large.
