DADU: A strike was observed and a protest rally was taken out in Dadu city on Monday against murder of a youth by a group of armed men outside his house in Gharibabad locality the previous night.

According to the bereaved family, 16-year-old Rehan, son of Ghulam Abbas Memon, was present outside their house when a group of armed men shot him dead and fled. His father said Rehan looked under stress for some days but avoided to reveal a cause to him or other family members. He said his son or the family had no enmity with anyone, and urged the police to arrest the killers.

Relatives of the victim along with a number of other people mainly members of the local Memon community took the body to the nearby section of the Indus highway in a rally and blocked the arterial road with burning tyres. They kept raising slogans against the murder for two hours during which the vehicular traffic on the highway remained suspended.

Dadu SSP Shabbir Ahmed Sethar along with a team of his subordinates assured the protesters of arrest of the killers as soon as possible and persuaded them to end their protest. Later, the SSP told local journalists that four suspects, whom he did not name, had been picked up for interrogation.

Rehan was a first year pre-engineering student of the Govt Boys Degree College, Dadu.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2017