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Mufti Shah Mir, the controversial religious scholar who was alleged to have assisted Pakistan’s intelligence agency ISI in abducting former Indian Navy official Kulbhushan Jadhav, was shot down in Balochistan’s Turbat on Friday evening.
Mir, also said to have been an arms and human trafficker masquerading as a religious scholar, was ambushed by masked shooters on motorcycles when he stepped out of a mosque after late evening prayers. He was shot repeatedly at point-blank range and died from injuries at a nearby hospital, said local reports.
Who is Mufti Shah Mir
Mufti Shah Mir was a high-ranking member of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), a Pakistani Islamic fundamentalist party. Intelligence sources allege he was directly associated with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and was instrumental in arranging terrorist infiltration into India. His activities were said to go beyond religious sermons, with charges of human trafficking and extrajudicial killings in Balochistan.
His murder is against the backdrop of rising violence in the area. Last week, two other members of JUI, Wadera Ghulam Sarwar and Molvi Amanullah, were also killed in the same manner in Khuzdar.
Link to Kulbhushan Jadhav’s Abduction
Mir’s name was consistently associated with the high-profile case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian businessman and ex-naval officer who was abducted in 2016 from the Iran-Pakistan border. Mir was reported to be among the middlemen who facilitated Jadhav’s transfer to the Pakistani military.
Jadhav was subsequently convicted of espionage by a Pakistani military court and sentenced to death in 2017, a decision that was strongly criticized by India. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) stepped in in 2019, suspending the execution and directing Pakistan to reconsider the conviction while providing consular access.
Rise of Target Killing
Mir’s assassination is similar to what happened to Mullah Omar Irani, a member of the terror group Jaish al-Adl, who was also accused of planning Kulbhushan Jadhav’s kidnapping. Irani was shot dead in Turbat in 2020, reportedly by ISI agents, according to analysts who suspected it was an internal cleansing.
Balochistan, which has been long gripped by insurgency and army crackdowns, has seen an upsurge in targeted killings. The suspected assassination of Mir by an apparent internal power struggle within ISI-sponsored networks adds to the long list of assassinations in the region.
Sources indicate that Mir was on the hit list of several groups because of his association with ISI-led death squads. “He played a key role in identifying and eliminating Baloch rebels as well as propagating religious extremism,” an intelligence official stated.
Although no agency has taken responsibility for the attack, rumors abound that Mir’s elimination is part of a larger housecleaning operation within Pakistan’s intelligence community.
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