KARACHI: Police on Monday took into custody seven persons and launched an investigation to determine whether the death of a young man, who fell from a high-rise building in DHA Phase VIII on early Sunday morning, was an ‘accident’ or not after the victim’s sister lodged a manslaughter case against his friends.

Adil Masood Khan, 26, fell from the terrace of an apartment in a multi-storey building on Sunday morning and died.

“We have lodged an FIR under Section 322 [qatl-i-bisabab, or manslaughter, of the Pakistan Penal Code] on the complaint of deceased’s sister Varda Masood, who came here from Lahore. We have detained the six friends of the victim as well as the flat owner,” said SSP-South Dr Mohammed Imran Khan.

He said all the held persons had left the victim unattended and fled after the incident.

The complainant in her statement before the police accused the building administration of not attending her brother or shifting him to a hospital for a considerable period, he added.

“The immediate task before us is to determine as to how he fell...whether it was an accident or his friends pushed him from the terrace with some mala fide intention,” the SSP said.

According to the FIR, the complainant said she lives in Lahore and she got a call from Adil’s friend, Hammad, who informed her about an accident and that her brother was shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre. Later, she came to Karachi after she was informed about the death of her brother.

She stated in the FIR that her brother’s friends — Syed Mohammed Ammar, Usman Ahmed, Mohammed Awais, Aziz Ahmed, Ahmed Jamil and Syed Khizr Akbar — had gone to a flat in DHA, Phase-VIII. They got the flat on one-day rent of Rs25,000 from Mohammed Shatba Qazi.

The complainant said all of Adil’s friend abandoned him and fled at 5am on Sunday and they neither informed anyone nor took her brother to a hospital.

She said the body was lying in an open area for two hours and then the building administration shifted the corpse to a hospital.

“I have strong doubt that one of the friends pushed my brother from the balcony,” she said in the FIR, demanding a legal action against the six friends and the flat owner and building administration.

Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2022