KARACHI, April 17: Two policemen were gunned down in different parts of the city, while a head constable was suspected to have committed suicide in his home on Sunday, officials said.

Mystery surrounded one of the killings when police collected a spent bullet casing from the balcony of an apartment where an inspector was found lying in a pool of blood, but could not find a weapon from the crime-scene.

The police said that Inspector Zulfiqar Qaimkhani was found lying in a pool of blood in the gallery of his flat in the New Karachi police lines on Sunday.

“A 9mm bullet had pierced his head, entering from the right and exiting through the left,” New Karachi SP Zafar Iqbal said.

The investigators found a spent bullet casing of 9mm pistol in the gallery.

The family was quoted as saying that as a matter of routine he returned from his morning walk and was standing in the balcony of his apartment when the incident occurred.

The victim’s wife and children were at home at the time of the incident, but none of them heard the gunfire, New Karachi SHO Kamal Naseem said, suspecting that a silencer-fitted pistol might have been used in the killing.

The police ruled out the possibility of it being a suicide, citing that they could not find any pistol in the balcony.

The family spotted the inspector lying wounded in a pool of blood. Subsequently, he was rushed to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Inspector Qaimkhani was recruited in the police department as an assistant sub-inspector in 1997 and worked with slain inspector Taufiq Zahid for some time. He was later promoted to the rank of sub-inspector and then inspector.

He was posted in the security zone after his recent postings as the SHO of the Bilal Colony and Sharifabad police stations.

The victim’s cousin, Shamsher, later lodged an FIR (82/2011) against unidentified suspects at the New Karachi police station under Sections 302 (premeditated murder) and 34 (common intention).

In the evening, a police constable was shot dead in Quaidabad while he was heading to work, officials said.

They added that police constable Bukhsh Ali was on his way to the Sukhan police station from his house in Hasan Panwar Goth in the Shah Latif area on his motorcycle when unidentified persons riding a motorcycle fired at him at Goji Morr.

The policeman was wounded and rushed to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, where he was pronounced dead.

He was married and had three children.

Suicide A head constable posted at the Jackson police station ended his life by shooting himself at around 2.40am on Sunday, police said.

Head Constable Sanaullah was alone in his room and his wife and three children were sleeping in another room of the police quarter in Keamari when he shot himself in the temple, said a duty officer at the Jackson police station. What drove the policeman to take his own life was not clear though police suspected some domestic issues as a possible cause.

Sanaullah used his personal pistol to end his life, the police said.

Later, the body was shifted to the Civil Hospital for medico-legal formalities.

Bodies found A woman and her daughter were found dead in a stormwater drain along the back of the National Institute of Public Administration in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, police said.

The police added that both the mother and daughter worked as maidservants. “Anwari Begum, 45, wife of Rafique, was apparently hit with a blunt object in the head, while her daughter, Shazia, seems to have been throttled,” Gulistan-i-Jauhar SHO Asif Jakharani said.

The police suspected that both victims were killed somewhere else and their bodies were dumped at the place before dawn. They claimed they learnt about the presence of the bodies at around 9am.

Subsequently, they shifted the bodies to the JPMC for a post-mortem examination.

Later, Anwari’s parents and Shazia’s husband reached the hospital and identified the women.

The police quoted the family sources as saying that the two women had left home on Saturday afternoon, but the family became perturbed when they didn’t return from work till the dusk.

Both victims were residents of Shahbaz Nagar, Dastagir, the police said.

The SHO said that Anwari Begum had a dispute with her husband, Rafique, on some issue.