KARACHI: A 15-year-old domestic servant was tortured and strangled to death in a bungalow in Clifton area, police and hospital officials said on Thursday.

Initially, the teenager’s death had been treated as “suicide” and doctors at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) had also declared it as a case of “hanging”, but re-examination of the body by a medical board on the request of police revealed that he was killed, said additional police surgeon Dr Qarar Ahmed Abbasi.

Clifton SHO Javed Abro said Mohammad Imran, 15, was found dead in a bungalow owned by a factory owner in Block-8 of Clifton at midnight between Oct 30 and 31.

The body was shifted to the JPMC at around 4.30am where doctors termed his death “caused by hanging”.

However, when on Wednesday morning the investigators visited the bungalow, they were informed that the boy had hanged himself by attaching his belt with a pipe in the wall, which was four feet high, said the area SHO. It raised doubts among the officers.

In the meantime, the house owner was trying to shift the body to Peshawar through a plane as the victim originally hailed from Dir. The police rushed to the airport, approached the cargo office and brought the body to cold storage for re-examination to ascertain the exact cause of death.

On the police request, a medical board, comprising Prof Farhat Mirza, police surgeon Dr Aijaz Khokhar and additional police surgeon Dr Qarar Ahmed Abbasi on Thursday morning re-examined the body and declared the case as that of murder.

“There were torture marks on his body,” said Dr Abbasi, adding that the teenager was strangled to death.

The house owner denied his involvement in the murder, the police officer said.

Later, the police handed over the body to his cousin who took it away to his native place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for burial. “We are waiting for relatives to initiate further probe to ascertain the identity and motive of the killer(s),” said SHO Abro.

Published in Dawn, November 2nd, 2018