FAISALABAD: Doctors of the Allied and DHQ hospitals on Wednesday staged a demonstration by abandoning work at the outpatient departments in protest against the killing of a senior doctor.

Mahmood Aleem, a retired professor of the Punjab Medical College, was shot at by two motorcyclists near Akbarabad Chowk on Tuesday night. Dr Aleem was shifted to the Allied Hospital, where he breathed his last after brief treatment.

Ghulam Mohammad-abad police registered a case under sections 109, 148, 149 and 302 of PPC against five people, three of them relatives of the slain, on the complaint of his son Saqib Aleem.

Family nominates relatives in case

The applicant said his elder brother Hassan married Mian Irfan’s daughter and divorced her after a couple of months due to domestic issues. He said the woman’s family blamed Dr Aleem for the divorce and Irfan and his sons Zain and Ali threatened him time and again.

“I am convinced that the incident took place at the behest of Irfan and his two sons,” he claimed in the FIR. The doctors of the Allied and DHQ hospitals took to Mall Road and demanded immediate arrest of the killers. The strike was observed on a call given by the Pakistan Medical Association, the Young Doctors Association and the Medical Teachers Association.

Office-bearers of the associations demanded that the chief minister ensure security of the doctors.

The fact that Dr Aleem was killed just a few yards off the Allied Hospital panicked the community, they said while demanding that police should leave no stone unturned to trace the killers.

City Police Officer Afzaal Kausar constituted two teams -- one led by the SSP operations and the other by the CIA SP -- to trace the perpetrators.

A police officer claimed that the nominated suspects had been taken into custody for interrogation.

Published in Dawn, July 27th, 2017