In one of the most shocking incident, the famous Pakistani Sufi singer Amjad Sabri was shot dead in his car by the unknown assailants who came on the bike armed with pistols. Amjad was Pakistan’s best known Sufi singer and musician. He was shot dead in the southern port city of Karachi in broad daylight. The Pakistani police described this as an ‘Act of Terror’. Read the complete report here.
[su_expand more_text=”READ MORE” less_text=” ” height=”0″ hide_less=”yes” link_style=”button” link_align=”center”] According to the news published in the Al-Jazeera the world famous Pakistani Sufi musician was gunned down by the unknown assailants who came on the bike and shot Amjad several times in his car and escaped via Hassan Square route in Karachi the capital city of Pakistan. This incident triggered an outburst of grief across the city.
According to the reports, Sabri was shot on several times on Wednesday. At the time of the incident, Sabri was driving in his car in the Karachi’s Liaquatabad area. The killers came on the bike alongside the vehicle and opened fire on the singer. “Two riders used 30-bore pistols to shoot Sabri five times. The bullet to the head took the qawwal’s life. The attackers took the Hassan Square route to escape,” narrated the Inspector General Mushtaq Mehar to media. “It was a targeted killing and an act of terrorism,” Muqaddas Haider, a senior police officer told AFP news agency, without naming possible suspects.
According to the sources, the 45-year-old singer is survived by a wife and five children. Sabri’s brother was also injured in this attack. On this evil incident The Washington Post wrote that By firing at least three shots into a beloved musician’s car in Pakistan’s largest city, two gunmen ushered in one of the darker days in that country’s quest for tolerance, art, and peace.
Amjad was carrying forward his family legacy left behind in him by his father Ghulam Farid Sabri. The Sabri family sang a kind of music particular to South Asia’s Sufi community. It is called qawwali. The Sabris were arguably the second-most famous qawwali singers after the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who introduced the form to the world beyond the subcontinent. There are millions of Sufis in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.
Above all, qawwali is devotional music, and its songs are odes to the love of God. They often conjure a relationship between the singer and God that is intensely personal, almost as if they are lovers. The Sufi tradition from which the music drives is unique to South Asia. Its practice often takes the form of mystical, musical folklore, and followers pay respects to dead Sufi saints at shrines big and small. Sufism preaches tolerance and peace and is about as far as can be from the strict forms of Islam that have gained a foothold in Pakistan in the past generation.
The killing of Sufi singer was condemned on the national and international level. People gathered outside the singer’s house to offer condolences to his wife and relatives. According to the sources, no organization took the responsibility of assassination yet. Fakhre Alam, the Chairman of the Sindh Board of Film Censors, claimed on Twitter that Sabri had earlier submitted an application for security, but the home department refused to follow up on it. Asghari Begum, Amjad Sabri’s mother told Al Jazeera, that about six months ago three unknown assailants came to their residence and had burst open the front door. Amjad was not present, and they had left. It shows this murder was done with long time planning and out of enmity.
Source: Various sources
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