KARACHI: The Malir police have arrested two teenage suspects during an investigation into the murder of a man in his 50s last week.
Citing statements of the suspects, a senior police officer said on Thursday that they were TikTokers and, along with their two companions, were using firearms in “fun and thrill” to make videos and upload them on their social medial platforms as they would often do.
He said the other two suspects went underground to escape arrest after the investigation was started by the law-enforcement agency.
Giving details of the incident, an official at the Malir police station said that a man in his mid-50s, Qamar Raza, had sustained bullet wounds while he was standing outside his home in the Jafar Tayyar area last week. “He died the next day while undergoing treatment at a hospital,” he said.
“Initially it was believed that a stray bullet had hit the victim. However, when the police started collecting evidence and recording statements of eyewitnesses, they came across the footages of a close-circuit television (CCTV) camera, installed at one of the houses in the locality, which had captured the whole episode,” he added.
The video, he said, showed four riders on two motorbikes coming out of a street near Ghazi Chowk in Jafar Tayyar and hitting the corner of the street where Qamar Raza was standing. The riders moved away and disappeared from the frame of the CCTV camera but a few seconds later, they returned and came close to him. One of them fired a shot from a very close range from his moving two-wheeler. Mr Raza sustained the bullet in the chest, said the official. “The riders sped away leaving the wounded men in a pool of blood. He was moved to the JPMC [Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre] but died the next day,” he said.
Malir SSP Irfan Bahadur said the police used technological support in identifying and tracing the suspects.
“The arrested ones have been identified as Saeed Ahmed and Fazil Ali,” said SSP Bahadur. They are hardly 14 or 15 years old.
Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2021
