General Tikka Khan HJ SPk (10 February 1915 – 28 March 2002) was a four-star army general in the Pakistan Army who was the first chief of army staff from 3 March 1972 until retiring on 1 March 1976. Along with Yahya Khan, he is considered a chief architect of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide

Quotes about Khan

• Yahya shoved aside the moderate general who had been governor of East Pakistan, terrifying Bengalis with his replacement: Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, known widely as “the butcher of Baluchistan” for his devastating repression of an uprising in that West Pakistani province. Blood knew he was one of the most extreme hawks in the military—a killer.
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Bhutto put the notorious General Tikka Khan in charge of the army, insisting that during the massacres “he was a soldier doing a soldier’s job.” (Tikka Khan later became a leader of the Pakistan People’s Party.) He denied not just the inflated Bangladeshi statistic of three million dead, but also the number of ten million refugees, insisting that Indira Gandhi had sent people from West Bengal. As for the women who were raped and killed, he flatly said, “I don’t believe it.”
  • quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

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