Muhammad Abbas Khan

Muhammad Abbas Khan ( – 31 March 2021) was a senior Pakistani police officer of the PSP 1963 batch who served as Inspector General of Police of three provinces: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (twice), Sindh, and Punjab. According to his obituary in The News International, this made him the only officer in Pakistan's police history to have done so.

He was a member of the Abbottabad Commission, the judicial inquiry into the circumstances of the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

He was an advocate for police reform, authoring a 1996 booklet that called for replacing the Police Act, 1861 with democratic legislation. Fasihuddin, a criminologist, later described him as a "pioneer of the movement of police reforms" in Pakistan.

Early life and education

Abbas Khan was born around 1939 in Prang village, Charsadda District, in what was then the North-West Frontier Province of British India. His family was related to political and industrialist families of the province. He oversaw the construction of red-brick police posts along provincial highways, designed by the architect Wilayat Khan, at intervals of approximately 20 kilometres. Built on retrieved state land, they were intended to deter highway robberies. He also founded the Special Branch of the NWFP police. , which argued for replacing the Police Act, 1861 with a new legal framework suited to a democratic state. The 1861 Act was colonial-era legislation that had governed policing across the subcontinent for 135 years. His proposals included making the police accountable to independent public safety commissions, granting administrative and operational autonomy to senior officers, establishing a National Police Agency, and enhancing professionalism across police sub-cadres. The booklet incorporated input from a Japanese police advisory mission invited by the Government of Pakistan in April 1996, led by the Director General of Japan's National Police Agency, whose experts had advocated replacing the prevailing "police for the government" principle with a "police for the people" philosophy.

Writing in the Pakistan Journal of Criminology, senior police officer Fasihuddin described Abbas Khan as a "pioneer of the movement of police reforms" in Pakistan, and noted that the booklet "became very famous" among police commission reports of that era. Fasihuddin further assessed that Abbas Khan and his colleagues influenced the Report of the Focal Group on Police Reforms in 2000, which was a direct precursor to the Police Order, 2002.

Abbas Khan remained involved in police reform after leaving service. He chaired the committee constituted by the Wafaqi Mohtasib to report on addressing maladministration in police stations; his earlier writings were also cited in the committee's published findings of 2016, produced pursuant to the Supreme Court's order in Civil Petition No. 1282/2014.

Post-retirement public service

After retirement, Abbas Khan held a number of institutional roles:

Member, Interior Ministry focal group on police reforms Member, committee on de-weaponization Member, National Public Safety Commission (2006) Member, Public Accounts Committee of the federal government Minister for Forests, Environment, and Transport in the caretaker government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (organised to oversee general elections) Chairman, search and scrutiny committee for the KP Ehtesab Commission Chairman, committee constituted by the Federal Ombudsman (Wafaqi Mohtasib Secretariat) in compliance with a Supreme Court order (Civil Petition No. 1282/2014, dated 4 September 2015) on addressing maladministration in police stations, contributing a paper on good administration standards.

Personal life and death

Abbas Khan was a Pashtun from Charsadda. Retired senior police officer Tariq Khosa cited Abbas Khan alongside Sadaat Ali Shah and Z.I. Rathore as among the most inspirational leaders of Pakistani policing, noting their shared willingness to refuse irregular and illegal orders from higher authorities.