KARACHI: A policeman was shot dead in Baldia Town on Sunday, officials said.

They added that armed men targeted 40-year-old police constable Abdul Wakeel a couple of hours before the sunrise when he was returning home after his duty hours.

“The victim was targeted in Baldia Town No 12 near Sector 9-B,” said an official at the Ittehad Town police station. “He was returning from the Pak Colony police station, where he was posted when two men on a motorbike fired multiple shots at him and rode away. He died on the spot.”

He said that investigators were looking into the incident from different angles to ascertain the motive but it seemed to be linked with the recent wave of policemen’s killings in the city.

Killing in Manghopir

A 55-year-old man was shot dead in the Manghopir area.

An official at the Manghopir police station said that the victim was identified as Habib-ur-Rahman. He was attacked by two men riding a motorbike near Northern Bypass close to the Hub river.

“The victim was a resident of Ittehad Town. He was hit by three bullets from a very close range but the motive for the killing remained unknown,” he added.

Man found shot dead

The bullet-riddled body of an unidentified young man was found in the Saeedabad area.

The police said that the body was spotted by some area people who informed the area police station.

“The victim seems to be in his late 20s,” said an official at the Saeedabad police station. “The body was found near Madina Majid in the Yousuf Goth area of Saeedabad. The body was moved to the Edhi morgue for want of identification after medico-legal formalities at the Civil Hospital Karachi.”

Bomb defused in Manghopir

In Manghopir, police found and defused a improvised explosive device, weighing around five kilograms, that was hidden in a rickshaw.

A bomb disposal official said that the Manghopir police informed the bomb disposal unit about two suspicious containers in the rickshaw outside an auto-workshop near Bakra Piri.

“The two containers were packed with explosives and attached to a detonator,” he said. “We don’t know the exact target but it was parked along the road outside the workshop to give an impression that it came for some repair work.”

Meanwhile, Sindh police chief Ghulam Haider Jamali announced a Rs100,000 cash reward for the Manghopir police, who “timely took action and prevented the area from a disaster”.

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2014