Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed

Brigadier (retd) Imtiaz Ahmed, known as "Billa", was a Pakistani army intelligence officer who spent about three decades in the security services, served in the ISI, and later headed the civilian Intelligence Bureau (IB). He is part of this record because of an Indian account that the ISI political wing he led helped the Khalistan movement. Pakistan has denied supporting Sikh separatists.

What the sources say

• Career. A Dawn column in 2009 said that he supervised anti-communist operations in Sindh as an ISI colonel under General Zia-ul-Haq, that his name was linked with arrests, torture and deaths in custody of political opponents, and that left-wing activists called him a butcher. The News wrote in 2025 that he worked during the Afghan jihad alongside the architects of Pakistan's covert support to the Afghan resistance.
• Punjab. Evelyn Hart wrote in Indian Defence Review (26 April 2007) that after Benazir Bhutto replaced Lieutenant General Hamid Gul as ISI chief, his successor abolished the ISI political division headed by Imtiaz. The article says the division watched Pakistani politicians and bureaucrats and assisted the Khalistan movement, and that on Gul's advice Nawaz Sharif, then chief minister of Pakistani Punjab, moved Imtiaz into the Punjab Special Branch to continue that work. The article is the author's account and cites no primary documents.
• Politics. The News links his name to Operation Midnight Jackal, a failed plot in 1989 to topple Benazir Bhutto's government through a no-confidence vote, and to the Mehran Bank case. He later headed the Intelligence Bureau, which, the paper says, monitored political opponents, wiretapped journalists and ran media campaigns.
• Arrest. During Benazir Bhutto's second term he was arrested on corruption and abuse-of-authority charges, convicted, imprisoned for a time and later released.
• 18 June 2025. He died at the Combined Military Hospital, Rawalpindi, after a prolonged illness, and was buried in the H-11 graveyard in Islamabad.

We found no published source that ties him to a named plan to unite Sikh and Kashmiri armed groups. The Punjab link rests on the Indian account above, which should be read as an allegation.