KARACHI: The Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) of police on Wednesday registered a case against unidentified suspects for the killing of two soldiers of Pakistan Army near Saddar Parking Plaza.

The case was registered on behalf of the state through Subedar Mohammed Iqbal under Sections 320, 427 and 34 of Pakistan Penal Code and Section 7 of Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997.

Lance Naik Abdul Razzaq and Sepoy Khadim Hussain were shot dead by armed pillion riders near St. Patrick’s School while they were on their way to Corps-V in their official vehicle.


‘Workers at Parking Plaza say cameras were kept off at the time of attack on army soldiers’


Sharing information obtained through CCTV cameras and witnesses, CTD officer Raja Umer Khattab said the army vehicle was coming from the side of the mausoleum of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which was slowed near city government’s Parking Plaza due to traffic jam. The officer said two suspects, both wearing helmets, were ostensibly chasing them. As the vehicle took turn towards the adjacent street leading to St. Patrick’s School, one of the suspects jumped from the motorbike and ran towards the army vehicle and fired seven shots from his pistol at the soldiers. Abdul Razzaq received four gunshot wounds in the head, while Khadim Husain sustained three bullet wounds.

The officer, who has been investigating the terror acts in the metropolis, said no spent bullet casings were found from the crime scene, because the attacker kept the pistol in a leather bag. Later, he added, the suspects escaped through the same route. The CCTV cameras installed by the police showed that they took University Road and disappeared somewhere in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, said Mr Khattab. He disclosed that CCTVs installed by the city government at its Parking Plaza were not working at the time of the shooting. He said workers at the Parking Plaza claimed that they tended to close the cameras from 2:30pm to 4:30pm on a daily basis to give them some ‘rest’.Police investigators on Wednesday said the targeted killing of two soldiers in the busy area of Saddar resembled to the murder of two soldiers around eight months ago in the same vicinity and they suspected involvement of the same group behind both incidents.

“To some extent, there were many similarities in the incidents,” said the CTD officer.

Mr Khattab said that distance between both the incidents was around two kilometres. They were targeted in daytime and shots were fired at their heads, he added.

Claim of responsibility

Reuters, a foreign news agency, has quoted the purported spokesperson of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a section of outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, claiming responsibility for the Saddar incident.

But the CTD officer said they did not consider such claims “credible or authentic”. He said it had been noted in the past that this militant group tended to claim responsibility immediately for terror acts, taking advantage of the silence of other groups who were actually involved in such attacks.

He believed that militants’ capacity to create terror through bomb blasts had been reduced to “large extent” but suspected that their shooters might still be involved in targeted killings in the city. He added that the networks of banned Al-Qaeda in the Sub-continent and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi existed in the metropolis.

Published in Dawn, July 28th, 2016

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