Said Akbar had a gun, a seat near the stage and about a second to use both. On Oct. 16, 1951, in Rawalpindi, the Afghan man fired two bullets at Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan. Seconds later, police shot him dead. Seventy-five years on, nobody knows for sure why he did it.
Liaquat had just said two words, “Baraadaraan-e-Millat,” meaning brothers of the nation. He was speaking at Company Bagh, a park in Rawalpindi, at a Muslim League gathering around 4 p.m. After he was hit, he was rushed to Combined Military Hospital. He died there at 56.
Akbar’s gun was a German-made 9mm Walther P38. He got it from a mujahid who had come back from Kashmir. Because police killed him so fast, they lost their only chance to ask about his motive. His son, Farooq Babrakzai, says a deputy superintendent of police, Khan Najaf Khan, shouted in Pashto for his men to shoot. Inspector Mohammad Shah fired six times from close range, and five shots hit. Muslim League members reportedly stabbed the wounded man with spears. Babrakzai wants to know why he wasn’t taken alive.
Akbar came from the Zadran tribe in Khost, in what is now Afghanistan. He and his brother, Mazrak Zadran, had opposed King Mohammad Zahir Shah. They surrendered to British authorities in North Waziristan in January 1947. After Partition, Akbar settled in Abbottabad, and Pakistan kept paying him a monthly allowance that started under the British. On the day of the shooting, he sat in a section reserved for Criminal Investigation Department officers. His 11-year-old son, Dilawar Khan, was beside him.
Many people point to Kashmir. In the first India-Pakistan war, from 1947 to 1948, Pakistan-backed fighters had entered Kashmir. A ceasefire began Jan. 1, 1949. Some Pakistani officers and tribal fighters wanted to keep going, and they were let down. Investigators asked whether Akbar felt the same way.
Babrakzai says his father offered, in the summer of 1951, to raise, fund and lead a tribal force into Kashmir. The official commission called that a “hoax” and did not name it as a motive. Babrakzai says men angry about the ceasefire got to his father and talked him into killing the prime minister. The commission also looked at two other ideas: that Akbar acted irrationally, or that he disliked Liaquat’s lifestyle and his wife Ra’ana’s refusal to observe purdah. It proved none of the three.
Liaquat’s own words don’t line up neatly with a Kashmir grudge. In a speech in New York, he said Pakistan would take any dispute to talks, mediation or arbitration. He said Pakistan would accept what Kashmiris chose in a vote, even as it kept its claim. He had also signed the Nehru-Liaquat Pact in 1950 to protect minorities in India and Pakistan.
Then there is the coup. Major General Akbar Khan, who led Pakistani forces in the 1947-48 war, thought the ceasefire was a mistake. On Feb. 23, 1951, he allegedly talked about toppling Liaquat’s government at a meeting of officers and left-wing thinkers. An insider exposed the plot. Liaquat announced the arrests March 9, including Brigadier M.A. Latif and poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Their trial began June 15. Four months to the day later, Liaquat was shot. Babrakzai says the two may be linked.
A commission led by Justice Mohammad Munir, with Akhtar Hussein, was named Oct. 25, 1951. It heard 66 witnesses in 38 sessions and delivered its report in February 1952. Babrakzai says 73 names, clauses and sentences were removed, mostly for security reasons. The commission found gaps in police testimony. Inspector Shah, who killed Akbar, was not questioned.
In August 1952, the head of Punjab’s Special Police, Nawabzada Aitzazuddin, died in a plane crash, and key records were reportedly lost. Those records later reached Scotland Yard’s Cecil Edwin U’ren, who studied the case in 1954 and 1955 and said Akbar acted alone. Ra’ana didn’t buy it. Babrakzai, who put out his own account in 2025, doesn’t either.
Liaquat was the first of several Pakistani leaders to die in violence. Benazir Bhutto was killed in 2007 outside the same park, now named Liaquat Bagh. President Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane crash in 1988, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed April 4, 1979.
Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, is 75 years to the day. The gunman died within moments, and he took his reasons with him. Kashmir may be one of them. It has never been proven.
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