KARACHI: A teenage boy and a girl were found dead in their car at an auto workshop near Pipri on Saturday, police said.

They said that an employee of the workshop found the bodies of Hammad Malik and Hira Pervez in the car.

The police were informed and the bodies were shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre to ascertain the exact cause of their death. However, their relatives did not allow doctors at the hospital to perform a post-mortem examination and took away the bodies, said Dr Seemin Jamali, the JPMC’s executive director.

Bin Qasim SHO Arif Razzak said that the deceased lived in Gulshan-i-Hadeed’s Phase-II and were neighbours. Malik, 18, was the owner of the workshop.

Quoting the employee who found the bodies, the area SHO said that when he opened the door, he smelled gas emanating from the car, which he said was unbearable. The officer opined that a gas leakage might have caused their death.

Police and CPLC recover retired bureaucrat who was kidnapped on Aug 6

He confirmed that the relatives took away the bodies for burial at their native places in Punjab without completing required medico-legal formalities.

Ex-bureaucrat recovered, two held

Police on Saturday claimed to have arrested two alleged kidnappers, including a woman, and recovered a former bureaucrat kidnapped a couple of days back.

DIG South Sharjeel Kharal told a press conference that Ali Akhtar and Erum were arrested with the help of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee when they came to collect ransom.

He said on a lead provided by the held suspects the police managed to recover abducted former bureaucrat Qazi Ishaq from Metroville, SITE.

He said Akhtar posed himself as a lawyer of the high court and an intelligence official.

Mr Ishaq, 65, was kidnapped from the Frere area on Aug 6 and the suspect demanded a Rs300,000 ransom. The suspects took him to different parts of Sindh and made phone calls to his family for ransom.

They asked the victim’s son to come to different places in the metropolis along with ransom amount, the officer added.

As part of their strategy, the police asked the family to pay the first instalment of ransom to kidnappers. The money was kept in the trunk of a “useless” car parked in the Paposh Nagar graveyard on Aug 8.

When the kidnappers came to collect the remaining ransom amount in Defence early on Saturday morning, the police took them into custody.

The DIG said that during interrogation, the held suspect told the police that he used to pose himself as a “lawyer as well as an official of an intelligence agency” to kidnap people.

He ‘confessed’ to his involvement in several incidents of kidnapping for ransom. He had also made a false identity on social media in the name of Advocate Ali to trap people as he offered his services in obtaining mobile phone call records or blocking of any mobile phone.

The police also recovered a car that had a Sindh High Court number plate.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2019