KARACHI: An undertrial prisoner died three days after being shifted from the Karachi central prison, where he had been allegedly tortured, said a member of the medical board that conducted a post-mortem on him in the presence of a judicial magistrate on Wednesday.

The deceased was arrested by the Malir City police along with former Mobina Town SHO Zafar Abbas on a charge of kidnapping Raheem Mengal on Feb 10. He remained in police custody till Feb 22 when he was sent to jail.

“Manzoor Shah died from a head injury caused by a hard and blunt object,” said senior medico-legal officer Dr Qarar Ahmed, who was part of the medical board led by forensic expert Prof Farhat Mirza with additional police surgeon Dr Aijaz Khowaja as its member, while talking to Dawn.

Manzoor died on Tuesday evening at the Civil Hospital Karachi (CHK), where he had been brought from the central prison on March 6, said a hospital official, adding that jail officials had told the doctors at the emergency department that he had become ‘unconscious’ after ‘fits’.

He was operated upon in the emergency room and was later shifted to the neurosurgery ward where he died during treatment, the official said.

His relatives told the media at the hospital that Manzoor Shah, who was said to be a private guard of the SHO, had been allegedly ‘missing’ since Jan 27 from his residence in the Pipri area. Later, they said, his arrest was shown in the kidnapping for ransom case.

The relatives claimed that they had met him in the jail two or three days before his death. He had not complained of any illness before being shifted to the CHK for treatment, they told the media.

A legal counsel for the family, Aqib Rajpar, told Dawn that Manzoor Shah had been picked up by policemen, some of whom were in plain clothes, in Gulshan-i-Hadeeb on Jan 27. The police approached his brother, Syed Lutf Ali Shah, the following day when he told them that he wanted to file a petition in a court. The police asked him not to file the petition, assuring him that they would ‘release him’ within a few days. But the police showed his arrest on Feb 10 on the charge of ‘short-term kidnapping’ along with the former Mobina Town SHO.

The lawyer said the police had shown Manzoor Shah as a ‘private guard’ of the accused police officer who had been allegedly involved in extracting money from Raheem Mengal.

Mr Rajpar quoted the victim’s brother who met him in the jail on March 3 as saying that Manzoor feared for his life, as the police allegedly wanted to implicate him and another man, Roshan Solangi, in the kidnapping case in order to give the benefit of the doubt to the SHO.

Later, the lawyer quoted doctors as saying that the UTP was admitted to the CHK where he was operated upon. “Blood was accumulated in his brain” as per the CT scan report, he said.

The police allegedly submitted a misstatement before the doctors citing that they had contacted the family but they did not come to meet him in the hospital, he added.

When the relatives met him around 28 hours after his admission to the CHK, he was not in a condition to speak, said Mr Rajpar, adding that they wanted to file a case against the jail authorities and the police after his burial on Thursday (today).

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2016