GUJRAT: A constable died on Friday from a bullet fired from his own pistol allegedly by accident by a woman while she was recording a Tiktok video.

Police claimed that three suspects, including two students of the University of Gujrat (UoG), had been arrested in the case.

City’s A Division police Constable Hassan Shahzad of Bhagowal village was found shot at and injured in a car near Biyowali area along Gujrat-Jalalpur Jattan road on Friday morning and three people – a man and two girls – were seen abandoning the car and boarding a bus.

Saddar police reached the site and shifted a critically injured Shahzad to Aziz Bhatti Shaheed Teaching Hospital where he later died.

The police’s crime scene unit collected forensic evidence and gathered call record data from the constable’s mobile phone. They then traced the three suspects through the data and arrested them.

The suspects included a close friend of the deceased, Muhammad Waleed of Bhagowal, as well as UoG students Laiba Zahid of Gujranwala and Raeesa Javed of Mandi Bahauddin, who were residing in the varsity’s girls hostel.

A senior police officer told Dawn that initial investigation revealed that the deceased along with Waleed had picked up their friends from Hafiz Hayat Campus of UoG on Thursday evening and they all spent a night in Lahore.

However, he said, on their way back to the varsity, one of the girls took Shahzad’s pistol and started making a video on Tiktok.

Despite being stopped by the constable, the girl continued playing with the weapon during which it went off and a bullet hit Shahzad in the head.

The suspects fled from the scene but were arrested later.

Saddar police registered a case against the suspects under sections 302 and 34 of PPC on the report of Muhammad Afzal, the father of constable Shahzad, and started an investigation.

His body was handed over to his family after autopsy.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2020