KARACHI: A fresh autopsy of one of the five suspects killed by police in an alleged encounter in Defence Housing Authority revealed on Wednesday that he was shot from very close range, casting doubt over the veracity of the shoot-out.

The fresh post-mortem examination of Ghulam Abbas was conducted by a medical board constituted by the health department on a court directive that came to the conclusion that bullets were fired from close range.

Abbas, the driver of local Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf leader Laila Parveen, was among five suspects shot dead in the DHA ‘encounter’ on Nov 27. The police had declared the five suspects as “members of an interprovincial gang of robbers”, who were involved in several house robberies in DHA.

On Wednesday, the body was brought from a cold storage facility to the mortuary of the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre.

The medical board comprising chairman of the forensic medicine department of the Jinnah Sindh Medical University Prof Farhat Mirza, Prof Parvez Makhdoom, additional police surgeon Dr Summaiya Syed and medico-legal officer Dr Ghulam Mustafa conducted the fresh autopsy.

Dr Syed told Dawn that Abbas suffered three bullet wounds, which were “contact shots”.

The “cause of death was injury number three [the third bullet], which pierced through abdomen and thorax, injuring liver, heart and great vessels leading to hemorrhagic shock”.

She said that the medical board was set up by the health department after directions of the court.

Dr Syed said that the first post-mortem examination was “incomplete” and the cause of death was based on “only external examination” of the bodies.

This was also the reason for constitution of the board for a new post-mortem examination.

Published in Dawn, December 10th, 2020