Aftab Khan was born in 1932, a few years before the partition of British India in 1947 created Pakistan. His documented professional life unfolded in Karachi, where the Surridge and Beecheno law firm had been established in 1948 as the new state was taking shape.
Aftab Khan's documented career is associated with Surridge and Beecheno, a law firm founded in Karachi in 1948. The firm's own history describes it as the oldest law firm in Pakistan, and it developed through a series of partnership changes in the decades after independence. Its early expansion reflected the growth of legal practice in a newly independent country where commercial and industrial development was becoming an important part of economic life.
In 1951 the firm admitted five new partners, including John Frederick Campbell Gallaher and Shaikh Mohammad Hassan. A reconstitution in 1961 made Gallaher, Hassan, Richard Francis Spickernell and Bertram Hameraley Bevan Petman the active partners, while other senior figures became sleeping partners.
In 1965 the firm appointed three new partners, Abdullah Bhojani, Ehsan Ahmed Nomani and Aftab Ahmed Khan, which increased the number of active partners to seven. Khan's partnership therefore dates from that expansion. The firm's history identifies Gallaher, a wartime pathfinder and later solicitor who held the Companion of the Order of the British Empire and the Distinguished Service Order, as the last of its British senior partners.
Khan's documented professional connections center on the partnership of Surridge and Beecheno, where he and John Frederick Campbell Gallaher, C.B.E., D.S.O., were both partners. Gallaher's partnership in the firm began in 1951, fourteen years before Khan was appointed a partner.
