The deadly incident took place in Sikandarabad, where Eidi Amin, the coordinator to MNA Abdul Qadir Patel, along with fellow party worker Ghani Bachani, was having a chat close to their homes after returning from the party's area office.
The latest double murder pushed the death toll to 10 — all PPP activists — in the National Assembly's constituency 239 since February 2010, where Abdul Qadir Patel emerged winner with 56,480 votes with Dr K.S. Mujahid Khan Baloch of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement as the runner-up.
“Since February 2008, each and every polling agent of my election has been murdered one by one,” Mr Patel told reporters outside the Civil Hospital Karachi, naming some eight victims in his constituency before the latest killing of his aides. “We are being trapped day by day and I know the people behind the killings but I don't want to get involved in any controversy.”
As in other incidents of targeted killing, the police appeared least effective in the Saeedabad incident, where the investigators have not yet moved forward to gather credible clues.
“It's (Sikandarabad) a poor neighborhood behind the police training school in Saeedabad,” said Inspector Raja Tariq, the SHO of the Saeedabad police station. “It was between 1.45am and 2am when two men riding a motorbike emerged and fired multiple shots, killing the two men on the spot.”
The investigators said they were still unclear about the exact mode of the killings as they could not get an eyewitness account that caused them to rely mostly on people's assessments and speculation.
“But we have traced that there were two men riding a single motorbike. We have collected a number of casings of spent bullets from the crime-scene that shows that a 9mm pistol, or pistols, was used in the shooting. There is no clue that either both riders shot at the victims, but the number of empty bullet casings indicate that more than one pistol was used in the firing,” added Inspector Tariq.
The news of their senior colleagues' killings attracted a large number of PPP workers at the Civil Hospital Karachi, where the bodies were taken for medico-legal formalities. The doctors found the two men hit in their chest, head and face from a very close range.
Amid sobs and tears, PPP MNA Abdul Qadir Patel briefly spoke to party workers asking them to stay calm, before announcing his resignation from the lower house of parliament and as the chairman of the National Assembly's standing committee on the interior before the media outside the CHK.
“I should first have asked the party's leadership before reaching such a decision, but I think one should not carry on politics of reconciliation over dead bodies,” he said with tears in his eyes and dozens of party workers surrounding him.
“I decided to resign as MNA, conceding my failure to protect the people of my own city, who were killed at their doorsteps. And this is not the first time that the targeted killings spree has claimed more than 30 lives in two/three days. It keeps returning time and again but unfortunately we have been unable to address the problem.”
