In the town of Rawalpindi, on the precarious frontier where India and Pakistan contend for the rich prize of Kashmir, an assassin's bullets rang out this week. They hit and fatally wounded Liaquat Ali Khan, 56, the chubby, able and moderate Prime Minister of Pakistan as he was making a speech to a crowded meeting. His assassin, a Moslem fanatic of a sect which favors holy war against India, was reportedly "torn to pieces" by the crowd.
Liaquat, who visited the U.S. last year, was a friend of the West, and an enemy of Communism. An Oxford-educated lawyer, who commonly wore Western business clothes and a Persian lamb cap, Liaquat helped the late Mohammed Ali Jinnah achieve the separation of Pakistan as a state in the 1947 partition of India, and succeeded Jinnah as its ruler. In the restive world of Islam, where the way of the moderate is hard, he was the 13th political figure since 1945, and the fifth this year, to be brought down by an assassin.