WEB DESK: Even on the day it happened it sounded too good to be true. To immense relief of general public the timely action by Karachi police successfully had averted into a huge carnage in this city of teeming millions.

Look at the arms the police recovered from a house near Nine-Zero in Azizabad - 11 anti-aircraft guns, 39 light machine guns, 82 submachine guns, 9 RPG-7, 11 7-MM, 1 M-16, 32 China rifles, 5 sniper rifles, 2,000 rifle grenades, 114 bullet-proof jackets and thousands of rounds. How big was the cache - it took two trucks and five mobile vans to transport these arms to army's ordnance depot for a forensic analysis. It was as if Karachi was sitting on the top of a volcano but the city police saved it before eruption.

In the words of city police chief, "In the light of disclosures made by a detained suspect, bigwigs of a political party provided help in procuring these arms and ammunition." He did not name the political party, but left no one in doubt that he was talking about the one that is still headed by Altaf Hussain. The arms were supposed to be used by "elements living in London, particularly with the co-operation of RAW for terrorist activities in the metropolis." If anybody ever thought the Karachi police was nothing but a collection of nincompoops he was supposed to think again.

This had happened on October 4, and then there was an eerie silence until this past Wednesday when the same police requested the administrative judge of the anti-terrorism courts to close the Azizabad arms recovery case. The police said it could find no clue to the culprits, therefore the case be treated as A-class which means it would be reopened if and when the suspect is arrested. And thus the case stands closed. But it does throw up some odd signs suggesting perhaps the whole exercise was cooked up to malign someone or to throw a spanner in someone's work. Even when the residents of the megacity were in prayers for the wellbeing of the local police for its timely action there were certain let-outs discernable to the watchful eye. For one, there was no private witness as the raid was conducted before the daybreak.

That means the prosecution cannot produce an independent witness to what the police recovered from the deserted house near Nine-Zero. Then there is no trace of the owner of the house from where the arms cache was recovered. To the extent that the house is registered in the name of a woman that police knows. But as to who that woman is the police are still clueless.

And the condition in which the cache was found at the time of recovery puts paid to the proponents who claimed that a particular political outfit had looted the Nato arms as these were being transported out of Afghanistan through the Karachi port - because when recovered these were wrapped in newspapers dated 2015. And it is no less intriguing that a case as critical as this should be closed in less than two months of its registration.

Is it then the possibility that all of it was engineered to achieve a certain objective, which has been achieved or has lost relevance to the political ambience as it now tends to obtain in Karachi?

There being an unmistakable tinge of suspicion to this development the residents of Karachi would expect the police chief to clear the air about the mysterious turn it has taken.

Source: Business Recorder