LAHORE: The Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) police claim to have arrested two alleged killers of a young lady doctor on Wednesday, a day after she was shot dead in a street crime in Z Block of the Defence Housing Authority (DHA).

The CIA made the arrests in a raid at a rented house in Nawankot where the suspects, Bilal and Ayaz, said to be brothers, were hiding after killing Dr Khola.

A senior police official told Dawn that the brothers were hardened criminals. As per police record, Bilal had committed 13 street crimes, while his younger brother nine and both were on bail in some of the cases, he added.

These “repeat offenders”, he said, on Tuesday intercepted and held at gunpoint Dr Khola at the doorstep of her friend’s house in Z Block. After snatching cash and her cell phone, the criminals demanded car keys from her and on facing resistance, one of them shot the young woman in her chest, he said, adding the doctor later succumbed to her wound in hospital.

After committing the crime, the official said, the suspects fled the scene on a bike.

He said the CIA teams working on the case obtained a CCTV footage that showed the suspects fleeing on the bike. “We spent almost eight hours at the Safe City Authority (SCA) to detect the movement of the bike the masked criminals used to escape,” he said, adding that their faces were captured in a SCA footage when they removed the masks.

The CIA teams then used a software to process the data that matched the face of one of the criminals with a photo available in the Crime Record Office (CRO) of Lahore police.

He said the suspects used to change their residences in the city to avoid arrest.

The CIA police managed to trace the computerised national identity card of Ayaz’s wife, which the suspects had been using to submit with relevant police stations to rent houses, and found her cell phone number documented under the Tenant Registration Programme. The police finally identified the location of the suspects’ present house, he said.

“A heavily equipped CIA team surrounded the house and arrested both of them during a raid from there at 11:30am on Wednesday,” the police official said.

He gave the CRO branch credit for the arrests, saying that otherwise it was very difficult to manually handle the record of such a large number of criminals as over 100,000 cases were registered every year.

Meanwhile, the Lahore police investigation DIG held a press conference and shared details of the arrest of the suspects. He said the police team that arrested the two suspects was headed by CIA Cantt DSP Rana Zahid Hussain.

The police also recovered the pistol used in the crime, besides the deceased doctor’s mobile phone and cash snatched from her, the DIG said, adding that the murder case had already been registered by the Defence A police.

Published in Dawn, September 30th, 2021