PAKISTAN/POLICE-AUTHOR Former top cop spins life on Pakistan's mean streets into novels

Record ID: 144844

  • Title: PAKISTAN/POLICE-AUTHOR Former top cop spins life on Pakistan's mean streets into novels
  • Date: 6th August 2015
  • Summary: ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN (AUGUST 6, 2015) (REUTERS) SAEED BOOK BANK VARIOUS OF PEOPLE BROWSING THROUGH BOOKS VARIOUS OF STACKS OF 'THE SPINNER'S TALE' GUESTS SITTING AT BOOK LAUNCH OMAR SHAHID HAMID, FORMER HEAD OF KARACHI'S COUNTER-TERRORISM DEPARTMENT-TURNED-CRIME WRITER, SPEAKING AT BOOK LAUNCH VARIOUS OF GUESTS LISTENING TO HAMID (SOUNDBITE) (English) FORMER HEAD OF KARACHI
  • Embargoed: 21st August 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Pakistan
  • Country: Pakistan
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAES1SZ0TZ1VG311JS7OIJCKQB8
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Top cop-turned author Omar Shahid Hamid made an appearance at Islamabad's Saeed Book Bank on Thursday (August 6) to launch his second novel, 'The Spinner's Tale'.
    Hamid's books were inspired by the underworld characters he met as he rose to become a top counter-terrorism cop in one of the world's roughest cities, Karachi.
    The damp alleys and grandiose mansions of Pakistan's sweltering, ultra-violent megacity are home to 20 million people. Among them move Taliban insurgents buying arms from gangsters, drug traffickers striking heroin deals, kidnappers, hitmen and mafia dons.
    Hamid joined the Pakistani police force vowing revenge after a hitman executed his father. After leaving the force 12 years later, the Taliban murdered his replacement - the man who had arrested his father's killer and become his best friend.
    He served as head of Karachi's Crime Investigation Department, a unit charged with hunting militants.
    The main character in 'The Spinner's Tale' is based on Omar Saeed Sheikh, the British-born graduate who beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl when Hamid was a new recruit.
    "I think the book was great, because it was extremely cathartic. And I think for me personally - and this may be a case on a more wider level as well - it enabled me to kind of articulate a lot of things that I felt and saw, others felt and saw, but no one had actually been able to pen down," 37-year-old Hamid told the audience at his book launch.
    The story follows two friends, united by their schooldays and a passion for a classmate and cricket, whose paths diverge as one immerses himself in Western culture and the other plunges into violence to destroy it.
    Hamid says he confronted his own divided loyalties after arresting a young militant recruit. The suspect questioned his integrity and mocked him for chasing justice through a system both knew to be violent and corrupt.
    Like his first book, 'The Prisoner', Hamid's characters bleed, agonise and brutalise their way through the pages as he brings alive thinly disguised anecdotes from his years on the streets.
    The plot is driven by smooth, sinister military officers, self-doubting cops, and hitmen hiring themselves out to mafia-like political parties; like the man convicted and hanged this year for killing Hamid's own father.
    Hunting such men was an obsession when he joined the force, Hamid explained.
    "One of the best days was when we caught a guy called Ishtiaq Policewala, and as the name indicates, he was a former police officer who had been involved in target killings of police officers. So what he did was he worked with a hit team, and he would finger various police officers who had worked on operations. And we were able to catch him. That's a day that always stands out because it was being able to do something for fellows cops," he said.
    As a police officer he arrested many educated, young, middle-class men seduced by militancy, a phenomenon that terrifies Western policymakers and fascinated Hamid.
    "Due process means that every sort of person, or every young man looking or joining or working for a militant group is now thinking, well you know, this could happen to us one day. So will our party or will our group be able to support us? And if they can't support us, why should we do all these things for that group? Why should we kill people? Why should we burn buses or whatever, at the behest of that organisation? So it was very important to send that message," the author said.
    Hamid's background as the son of a senior civil servant, educated at one of the country's top schools and British universities, made him an unlikely recruit for Pakistan's embattled and much maligned police force.
    Like his police protagonists, ordinary men struggling to find their peace within a corrupt system, he sometimes seems like a genteel outsider in a world that can be brutal, as a few gruesome torture scenes reveal.
    But the education that set him apart also gave him a voice, he said.
    "The police is chock-full of amazing stories, you know. Great stories, all of which are true, many of which if you heard them, you would...no one... You know, the best scriptwriter in Hollywood couldn't come up with stuff this good. But they're stories that we may share internally over a cup of tea, or while waiting on a raid. But it's a world which we don't give access to outsiders," Hamid explained.
    'The Spinner's Tale', published by Pan Macmillan India, was released in the Indian subcontinent in June. Negotiations are underway for a European release.
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