LAHORE: The initial postmortem report of seven Model Town tragedy victims confirmed that firearm injuries were the cause of deaths, Dawn has learnt.

The autopsies were performed by District Standing Medical Board (DSMB) at the Forensic Department of Allama Iqbal Medical College/Jinnah Hospital.

According to the laid-down Standard Operating Procedure (SoP), autopsy or postmortem procedure is performed by the DSMB of those victims who are killed in ‘police encounters’ or in jails.

It was the first written evidence in the wake of the Model Town raid which proved that seven people, including two women and a boy, were ‘shot dead’. Earlier, some police officials had attributed deaths to a physical clash.

The medical experts also found a bullet from the abdomen of a victim and dispatched it to the Forensic Science Agency (FSA) for analysis, a senior official who was close to the autopsy process told Dawn.

Requesting anonymity, he said this bullet’s analysis would establish whether it had been fired from an official weapon or a private one.

He said the FSA analysis had attained importance in the wake of the police statements which claimed that some workers of the Pakistan Awami Tehreek were armed and many security guards were also seen firing during the clash.

The analysis report of the bullet, he said, would establish the involvement of the police or any other private armed men, he said.

The police in its dockets, submitted to the DSMB to facilitate the autopsy procedure, had categorically mentioned the nature and the number of bullet injuries. The police docket is imperative to perform autopsy of a human body.

The docket also provided information, including name of the victim, age, sex, height, and date, time and place of incident besides other relevant information.AIMC Principal Prof Dr Mahmood Shaukat confirmed that the DSMB was normally engaged for the postmortem of victims of ‘police encounter or those who died in jail’.

“But we involved both the Forensic Department of the AIMC and DSMB for combine postmortem of the seven dead to avoid legal complications”, he said.

He said the reports of these two departments have been dispatched separately for consideration. To a question, Prof Shaukat said the two departments were involved because there was confusion about the ‘mode’ of killings of the seven people – either they were shot dead in police encounter or by civilians.

Earlier, the autopsy by this board triggered a controversy. It was feared that the killing of seven PAT workers might be attributed to ‘police encounter’ in later stages.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2014