ISLAMABAD, Sept 11: Enraged villagers lynched two policemen in Tarnol area in the dead of Tuesday night allegedly to avenge the death of a co-villager at the hands of the law enforcers.

Islamabad police were tight lipped over the gruesome street justice, delivered to ASI Mohammad Ramzan and constable Ansar Abbas of Ramna police station by the residents of Doray village.

Both the police and the villagers narrated contradictory versions of the bloody event.

Three senior police officers, however, confided to Dawn on condition of anonymity that their two colleagues had intercepted a man, Hayat, around 11pm Tuesday and found narcotics on him.

When the carrier told them that he had purchased the stuff from a drug peddler in Doray village, the two policemen headed for the village with an informer.

According to the three officers, Doray is notorious for “harbouring generations of criminals”, so much so that police advise the households in its neighbourhoods not to employ anyone from the village as domestic servant.

When the two policemen and their informer reached the village about midnight, they were accosted by some villagers about their mission.

And that allegedly led to a deadly brawl between the villagers and the policemen in which one Raja Nadeem was killed.

That infuriated the villagers who seized the two policemen, pushed them into a room of a big house where the revenge seekers mercilessly stoned them to death.

A caller informed Rescue 15 about the brawl and gunshots which made Tarnol police send a force to maintain law and order in Doray village.

A search team, accompanied by senior police officers and assistant commissioner of Islamabad, also arrived to look for the incommunicado Ramna policemen.

Alerted by such big force, the murderous villagers fled the scene and the search party found one of the policemen dead.

The other died before their eyes, with a wall of the room red with their blood and stones and bricks strewn all around.

The police informer was luckier. He was found in another room, all naked and shivering, and was rescued, according to the senior police officers.

Villager Raja Imran registered a case with Tarnol police that the two policemen, accompanied by his family’s “rival”, raided their house which resulted in a brawl and the death of his brother Raja Nadeem by a shot fired by the policemen.

Islamabad police have also registered a case against more than 20 villagers on charges of murder, murder attempt, wrongful confinement, rioting with deadly weapons and unlawful assembly. Police named some of the accused in the FIR.

A villager claimed to Dawn that four persons intercepted Raja Nadeem and tried to snatch cash and valuables from him. His resistance “provoked the robbers”, and one of them shot him fatally.

He said the gunshots brought villagers to the scene. Enraged at seeing Raja Nadeem lying on the ground dying, the crowd overpowered three “robbers” while the fourth one escaped.

The villager claimed the seized men were shifted to a house for handing them over to police.

Another villager said that relatives and friends of Raja Nadeem erupted in anger on hearing about his death.

Despite the intervention of village elders, they vented their anger on the policemen by stoning them which resulted in their death.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Dr Mohammad Rizwan told Dawn that the district magistrate, Deputy Commissioner Amir Ahmed Ali, has appointed assistant deputy commissioner revenue Farasat Ali Khan to conduct an inquiry into the killing of two policemen and establish the facts, as soon as possible.