Seventy-five years ago, Pakistan’s first prime minister stepped up to speak in Rawalpindi and never finished. Liaquat Ali Khan got out two words, “Baraadaraan-e-Millat,” which mean brothers of the nation. Then two bullets hit him. It was Oct. 16, 1951.
He was at Company Bagh, a park in Rawalpindi, to speak at a Muslim League gathering. It was about 4 p.m. A man sitting near the stage, Said Akbar, fired twice with a 9mm pistol. Liaquat was rushed to Combined Military Hospital and died there. He was 56.
Seconds later, police shot Akbar dead. His son, Farooq Babrakzai, says a deputy superintendent of police, Khan Najaf Khan, shouted in Pashto, asking who fired and telling his men to shoot. Inspector Mohammad Shah then fired six shots from close range, and five hit. Muslim League members reportedly stabbed the wounded man with spears. Babrakzai asks why nobody tried to take him alive.
The gun was a German-made Walther P38. Akbar bought it from a mujahid who had come back from Kashmir. Since he died within moments, police never got to ask him why he did it.
So who was he? An Afghan from the Zadran tribe in the Khost region. He and his brother, Mazrak Zadran, had fought against King Mohammad Zahir Shah and then surrendered to British authorities in North Waziristan in January 1947. After Partition, Akbar settled in Abbottabad. Pakistan kept paying him a monthly allowance that began under the British. At the rally, he sat in a section meant for Criminal Investigation Department officers, close to the prime minister. How he got that seat is still a question. His 11-year-old son, Dilawar Khan, was with him and saw the chaos.
The first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir ran from 1947 to 1948. A ceasefire took effect Jan. 1, 1949, almost three years before the shooting. Some Pakistani officers and tribal fighters were unhappy that the fighting stopped. That is why investigators looked at Kashmir as a motive.
They looked at three ideas: that Akbar acted irrationally, that he hated Liaquat’s Kashmir policy, or that he disliked Liaquat’s lifestyle and his wife Ra’ana’s refusal to observe purdah. None was proven. Babrakzai says that in the summer of 1951, his father offered to raise, pay for and lead a tribal force into Kashmir. The commission called the offer a “hoax.” Babrakzai believes men angry about the ceasefire got to his father and talked him into the killing.
Liaquat’s own words make it harder. In a speech in New York, he said Pakistan was ready to settle every dispute through talks, mediation and arbitration. He also said Pakistan would accept whatever the people of Kashmir chose by vote, though Pakistan still claimed the region. This was the same man who signed the Nehru-Liaquat Pact in 1950 to protect minorities in both countries.
Months before the shooting, Pakistan had uncovered its first attempted military coup. Major General Akbar Khan, who led Pakistani forces in the 1947-48 war, thought accepting the ceasefire was a mistake. On Feb. 23, 1951, he allegedly talked about overthrowing Liaquat’s government at a meeting of officers and left-wing thinkers. The plot got out through an insider. On March 9, Liaquat announced the arrests of Akbar Khan, Brigadier M.A. Latif, poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and others. Their trial began June 15, 1951. Four months later, Liaquat was dead. Babrakzai suggests the two events are connected.
On Oct. 25, 1951, Pakistan named a commission led by Federal Court Justice Mohammad Munir, with Punjab Financial Commissioner Akhtar Hussein. It heard 66 witnesses in 38 sessions, 23 in Lahore and 15 in Rawalpindi, and turned in its report in February 1952. Babrakzai says 73 names, clauses and sentences were cut, mostly for security reasons. The commission found gaps in police testimony. Inspector Shah, the man who killed Akbar, was never questioned.
In August 1952, Nawabzada Aitzazuddin, head of Punjab’s Special Police, died in a plane crash, and important police records were reportedly lost. Those same records later reached Cecil Edwin U’ren of Scotland Yard, who studied the case in 1954 and 1955 and decided Akbar acted alone. Ra’ana did not believe it. Decades later, neither did Babrakzai, who says investigators never properly checked whether others were involved. He published his own account in 2025.
Liaquat’s death was the first in a long line of political violence in Pakistan. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in 2007 outside the same park, now called Liaquat Bagh, and the facts of her case are still disputed. President Zia-ul-Haq died in a plane crash in 1988 that is still a mystery. Former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed April 4, 1979, after a trial many called unfair.
Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, marks 75 years since Liaquat’s killing. Pakistan knows who fired the bullets. It still does not know why, or whether anyone else was behind it. Kashmir may have been the reason, but nobody has ever proven it.
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