A prime minister rises to speak in front of a crowd of around one hundred thousand people. He has barely begun when two shots ring out at close range. The wounded leader is rushed to hospital, but he dies the same day. And the only man who could explain why — the gunman himself — is shot dead by police on the very same spot, seconds later, before he can answer a single question. Seventy-five years later, the murder of Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's first prime minister, is still officially unsolved. This is episode 3 of our History of Pakistan series: who killed Liaquat Ali Khan?
The Man Holding Pakistan Together
To understand what Pakistan lost that day, remember where the country stood. Its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had died in 1948, just thirteen months after independence, as we saw in the last episode. The man holding the fragile new state together after him was Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah's right hand and Pakistan's first prime minister. He ran the government day to day, managing refugees, finances and a tense standoff with India.
And 1951 was already a dangerous year. Only months earlier, his government had uncovered a secret coup plot by senior army officers — a separate affair known as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy. No link between that plot and what followed has ever been established.
16 October 1951, Company Bagh
On the sixteenth of October, 1951, Liaquat travelled to Rawalpindi, a city in the north of the country, near where the modern capital, Islamabad, would later be built. In the late afternoon, he addressed a huge public gathering of the Muslim League at a park called Company Bagh. Around one hundred thousand people had come to hear him.
He had only just begun speaking when a man at the front of the crowd fired a small pistol and hit him twice in the chest. Liaquat was carried from the stage and rushed to hospital, where doctors gave him a blood transfusion, but he died of his injuries that same day. Pakistan had lost the second of its founding leaders in just four years.
The Gunman Who Could Never Answer
The gunman was identified within moments as Said Akbar, an Afghan national from Khost, a Pashtun of the Zadran tribe whose father had been a tribal chief. He had fought in the Afghan tribal revolts of the nineteen forties and later taken refuge inside Pakistan, and he was already known to the Pakistani police before that day.
But none of that could be tested, because police officers at the scene shot him dead almost immediately. He was never arrested, never questioned, never tried. Whatever he knew — whether he acted alone or someone sent him — died with him in that park, and every investigation since has had to work around that silence.
Two Enquiries, Two Different Answers
The official enquiry, led by Justice Muhammad Munir, reported in 1952. It examined the suggested motives, including a fit of insanity and religious fanaticism, and rejected those two. But it refused to close the case: it said it could not establish whether Said Akbar acted alone or as the tool of a conspiracy, and it withheld some details in the public interest.
The mystery deepened when a senior police investigator died in a plane crash while travelling with case files — a loss that fuelled public suspicion for decades. Then a later review, assisted by Scotland Yard, leaned the opposite way and concluded the gunman had probably acted alone. Two official looks at the same murder, pointing in different directions. Theories circulated freely, but not one was ever proven.
Shaheed-e-Millat — and a Question Still Open
Liaquat Ali Khan was given the title Shaheed-e-Millat, Martyr of the Nation, and buried in Karachi beside Jinnah himself. Company Bagh, the park where he fell, was renamed Liaquat Bagh in his memory. Decades later, in 2007, it would tragically become the scene of another prime minister's assassination, that of Benazir Bhutto.
Governor General Khawaja Nazimuddin stepped down to take over as prime minister, and Pakistan entered years of political instability. But the central question never went away: who killed Liaquat Ali Khan? Seventy-five years on, the honest answer is that nobody knows, and the file was never truly closed.
Next in this series: History of Pakistan, episode 4 — the strange story of the paralysed man who became Governor General of Pakistan.
Watch the video: Who Killed Liaquat Ali Khan? | History of Pakistan #3 on YouTube. This article is the full written version of the video, in simple English. See all articles on the Blogs page and more videos in the History Series.