Blood and billions: Inside Pakistan’s drug trade

The heinous killing of 23-year old Mustafa Amir is familiar in many ways. This is not the first murder to take place in an up-scale neighbourhood, nor the first to be sensationalised in the news media, and not even the first to shock an entire nation because of the sheer brutality of this act.

Which is why the way it is playing out is not surprising in the least. Some crimes are so shocking, so unexpected, and so out of place that they capture the attention of an entire population. The initial shock comes from the connection between the brutality of events and the victim. Any murder is shocking, it is doubly shocking when it takes places with cold-hearted intent and violence, and it is almost unimaginable when it happens in places like DHA. The shock leads to a morbid fascination. 

Who was this victim? What kind of trouble did they get mixed up in that led them to this point? Just how innocent were they in all of this? The same sequence of events has played out in the Mustafa Amir case. It began with shock over his disappearance and the baseless reports that he had been dismembered and fed to lions. Eventually, it began to emerge that the murder had taken place in the midst of drug deals and romantic jealousies. And finally, the victim himself was cast as some kind of linchpin in Karachi’s drug economy. 

To understand this story in a fair and judicious way, it is important that we lean into this familiarity and admit some difficult truths. The police would like you to believe that the deceased was a drug dealer, and they point towards a case against him registered by the Anti Narcotics Force a few years ago. The reality is that most universities in Pakistan probably have a few students attending that have gotten in trouble with the ANF or other law enforcement authorities over drugs. That does not mean they are dealers, they could simply be users that got caught at a bad time.