KARACHI, Aug 6: A senior banker was gunned down near the City Railway Station in what appeared to be a sectarian attack on Saturday, police said.

They said 57-year-old Syed Muntazir Mehdi Rizvi was targeted in the parking lot of the railway station minutes after he had parked his car there as a matter of daily routine.

“According to a few witnesses, two men on a motorbike emerged there as he got off the car and one of them fired shots at him,” said Inspector Habib Khattak, the SHO of the Karachi Cantonment Railway police station, also taking care of the City Station police as an additional charge.

“Hit by two bullets, the victim died on the spot. It seems that the attackers were waiting there for him to arrive. They sped away after executing the job.” The body was later shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre for medico-legal formalities.

The victim was a resident of Gulistan-i-Jauhar. He had been associated with a private bank for the past several years. He was also a trustee of the Sharikat-ul-Hussain Imambargah in Gulshan Iqbal.

Though the police investigators remained clueless about the motive and people behind the killing, religious scholars and organisations believed that Mr Mehdi was murdered on sectarian grounds. They condemned the incident and termed it a failure of the city's security administration.

“The government has failed to end violence and no credible action is seen on the ground against the banned outfits, which are involved in these killings to destroy sectarian harmony and peace,” said religious leaders Abbas Kumaili and Maulana Hasan Zafar Naqvi in a joint statement issued by the Majlis-i-Wahdat-i-Muslimeen.