KARACHI: Police on Thursday submitted a supplementary charge-sheet before the administrative judge of the antiterrorism courts against a suspected hitman in a triple murder case.

Mohammad Minhaj Qazi alias Asad along with his accomplices has been booked in the murder of the then managing director of the Karachi Electric Supply Company Malik Shahid Hamid, his driver, and guard in the Defence Housing Authority in 1997.

In the investigation report, the investigating officer charge-sheeted Qazi as one of the suspected shooters.

Moreover, the IO also named the Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain, the current convener of the party Nadeem Nusrat and a London-based leader Sohail Zaidi as absconders in the supplementary charge-sheet for allegedly instigating the offence.

The report said Qazi and Saulat Mirza along with their two other accomplices had fired at the car of the KESC MD with Kalashnikov assault rifles. It added that former bureaucrat Shahnaz Hamid, the widow, and her police officer son, Omar Shahid Hamid, were the eyewitnesses and they rightly picked out Qazi around 19 years after the killing as one of the alleged shooters during an identification parade before a judicial magistrate last month.

Both the witnesses in their statements before the magistrate deposed that Shahid Hamid was working against corruption and reorganising the power utility and they blamed some leaders of the MQM for extending threats to the slain MD before the murder.

After accepting the charge-sheet, the administrative judge of ATCs, Karachi, sent the case to ATC-V for trial.

The Pakistan Rangers, Sindh, had picked up Minhaj Qazi in February and placed him under 90-day preventive detention for investigating his alleged involvement in terrorism cases.

After the end of his detention period, the suspect was handed over to police in an illicit weapon case last month. He was formally shown arrested in the present case on May 9.

An ATC had already sentenced MQM worker Saulat Ali Khan, better known as Saulat Mirza, to death in 1999 in this case and he was executed in Machh jail in Balochistan on May 12, 2015.

According to the prosecution, Shahid Hamid, his driver Ashraf Brohi, and guard Khan Akbar were gunned down in an attack on his car in Defence Housing Authority on July 5, 1997.

A case was registered under Sections 302 (premeditated murder) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code read with Section 7 of Anti-terrorism Act, 1997, on the complaint of Mr Hamid’s widow at the Defence police station.

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2016