Pakistan: Crime, culture and forensics

By: Rafia Zakaria

WE are all aware of the failings. Five years ago tomorrow will mark not simply the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto but also scenes that have become etched in our minds as hallmarks of incompetent crime investigation. On Dec 27, 2007 the bloodied grounds of Liaquat Bagh were washed clean of evidence that could have led to an indictment of the culprits. The end of that saga was known even then; no evidence meant no trial, no truth and ultimately no justice. Since then, the order of events has become routine: a horrific attack, devastation, panic, pain, scattered pieces of a puzzle, bodies carried away, bomb fragments left to foraging journalists and garbage collectors. The recent assassination of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial minister Bashir Bilour was one more reminder of the failure of forensics in Pakistan: the crime scene open and bleeding and soon contaminated by thousands of destructive footsteps, hundreds of pilfering hands. The body bathed and buried without autopsy, uncollected evidence abandoned in the crippling emotional aftermath of another catastrophe. Through the years of skyrocketing bomb explosions and suicide attacks much has been said about the lack of sufficient facilities to undertake forensic investigations. In Karachi, the city of target killings, with 18 million lives stuck in the middle, there is to date no operational DNA lab that can analyse samples from crime scenes for evidence at a trial. An attempt to amend this situation took place earlier this month, when the Sindh governor signed an MoU with a Turkish company for the establishment of a DNA and forensics laboratory in the city. Things have not fared well for those planning to establish a forensics laboratory in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which has a very ill-equipped one at the moment. In 2001, the Japan International Cooperation Agency had planned on setting up a forensics lab at the Khyber Medical College in Peshawar. As part of this plan, a PCR machine was purchased for Rs3.1 million. This machine sat around for years without being used. This was because the other equipment necessary for analysis was never actually purchased. At the frontline of the war against terrorism, therefore, there are no facilities to take apart the mechanics of terror or to tell stories in a way that they lead to the courts to enable evidence with culpability to be established and justice meted out. The state of such a laboratory, or what would have been one, is an apt metaphor for the story of forensics and crime scene investigation in Pakistan. Like the pricey PCR machine that could not function without the pipes and accompanying sequencer among other parts, the idea of forensics in Pakistan exists in a lonely, unsupported place. The loneliness of its position can be understood in relation to a horrible massacre in another part of the world. On Friday, Dec 14, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in New-town, Connecticut and opened fire. The ensuing events are known all around the world: 20 children and six adults lay dead within minutes of the forced entrance. What may have received less attention is the forensic processing of the scene. It was nearly 48 hours after the school carnage that anyone other than investigators was allowed to approach the scene of crime. The bereaved parents who had sent their children to school that morning did not get to see them when they learned that they had perished. They were forced to wait until every aspect of the scene was processed before they could do so. The bodies were finally released to the medical examiner’s office on Sunday, two days after the shooting. The American media, eager anchors and swooping satellite vans all waited around Sandy Hook, for statements and glimpses and sound bites; but none were able to get inside the crime scene. The shooter was known and already dead, never to be prosecuted, but this did not stop a full and complete investigation that would provide a complete story of the massacre. Here in Pakistan then, the difference is not simply one of technological ability but also whether a culture accepts forensics as a means of understanding tragedy. Away from the requirements of forensic labs (even if these exist), religious and cultural mores in Pakistan create hurdles for the requirements of investigations: delayed burials, autopsied bodies and closed-off crime scenes and what is required of families, media and loved ones. In this sense, the failure of forensic investigation in Pakistan reflects not simply the absence of this machine or that laboratory, but also a lack of belief in the values of empirical knowledge in general and the cultural space for digesting it as well. Nowhere is this more visible than in the processing of death resulting from crime or tragedy where the imperatives of heroicising the dead, enabling the rites of communal mourning and creating a socially palatable narrative are, in Pakistan, far more important than the brute facts. Finally, while secrets and sealed-off locations are hardly new in Pakistan, they are connected not to investigation but rather to a surreptitious shortening of due process: the unknown drone victims, the tortured journalist found in a ditch. At the tail-end of a year of bombings, looking ahead to one that is likely to bring more of the same, some consideration must be given to whether Pakistanis as a society really want the facts, or prefer to shy away from reality in life as in death, forensics or otherwise.