Fatima Bhutto slams renaming police training school after Shahid Hayat

LONDON: Best-selling author Fatima Bhutto has slammed the Sindh government’s decision to name a training school after former Karachi police chief Shahid Hayat.

In a series on tweets, Bhutto said she will never forget that Hayat was charged with the murder of her father, Murtaza Bhutto, who was shot dead by police in 1996.

Terming the decision to name the Saeedabad Police Training College after Hayat, she said: “I’ve never forgotten their complicity with my father’s killers. A monument will remind everyone else.”

“My father, a sitting member of parliament, was shot several times, in the face and throat, and left to bleed to death without medical attention on the street for over an hour,” she added.

It’s revealing+damning that the Sindh govt would name the Police Training College Saeedabad after Shahid Hayat, a police officer charged w/ the murder of my father,Murtaza Bhutto. I’ve never forgotten their complicity with my father’s killers. A monument will remind everyone else

— fatima bhutto (@fbhutto) June 28, 2020

“Shahid Hayat was part of the police force there on the road that night,” noted Bhutto, a novelist and the granddaughter of Pakistan’s former prime minister and PPP founder Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

“By naming Police Training College Saeedabad after Hayat, are these the tactics the Sindh government is planning to teach a new generation of police officers?”

Shahid Hayat served as ASP Saddar when Murtaza Bhutto was gunned down in police encounter outside his residence in Karachi along with six other party activists.