MUZAFFARABAD: A 34-year-old man was gunned down in Mirpur on Thursday as a result of an old enmity between two families belonging to Mandi Bahauddin, police said.

Mohammad Ashraf Gondal, a resident of Rerka Bala village in Phalia tehsil of Mandi Bahauddin, told city police that he had been running a stockyard on the land of a local person in Mirpur for about 15 years, where his son Rafaqat Ali and nephews Hamid Iqbal and Azhar Iqbal were also lending him help.

On Thursday, when he was visiting a relative at some other place, seven suspects arrived in his stockyard at about 5:50am on motorcycles, and one of them, identified as Mubashar alias Baggu, opened fire on his son Rafaqat with a 30-bore pistol, Mr Gondal said.

Rafaqat sustained a bullet to his right wrist and rushed towards the fields to save himself, but in vain, he said, adding that Mubashar fired more shots at him, which caused his death on the spot.

All the suspects fled from the scene after committing the heinous crime, the complainants said.

He told the police that the enmity with the suspects was because of litigation over previous murders.

SSP Mirpur Kamran Ali told Dawn that the suspects had been booked under sections 302, 109, 337, and 34 of the Azad Penal Code.

“We will soon hunt them down to bring them to justice,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2024