RAWALPINDI, Sept 7: A brawl among schoolchildren in the PTCL Colony in the cantonment area on Thursday ended in the cold blooded murder of three brothers and injuries to two others late in the night.

R.A. Bazaar police registered a case on the complaint of the injured Mohammad Zareen but said no one could be arrested as the alleged assailants fled after the massacre.

As the day broke and the gruesome tragedy became known, people of the area came out to protest, placing coffins of the murdered brothers in the middle of the Mall Square in Saddar.

They claimed that the tragedy might have been averted if the police had acted promptly on the alarm raised by the aggrieved family.

In the FIR that he registered with R.A. Bazaar police, Zareen, 46, stated that accused Chaudhry Shahadat came with his brother Chaudhry Arshad and two other persons in a white car to his house on Thursday afternoon, demanding to know why their little cousin Nabeel had beaten up his son at school.

“I told Shahadat that the sons of Qureshis had a fight with Nabeel. On this, he left, cursing and abusing, to get the sons of Qureshi.

In the meantime, I rushed my two brothers to alert the R.A. Bazaar police station but police did not entertain them,” he said.

“After some time, Chaudhry Shahadat and his men returned to our place and started firing indiscriminately. My brother Muhammad Nadeem died on the spot while two other brothers, Muhammad Azeem and Muhammad Amir, myself and our cousin Muhammad Nawaz, were injured,” he said.

Zareen told Dawn that had police officials responded in time, the lives of his brothers would have been saved.

A heavy contingent of police arrived and Rescue 1122 ambulances shifted the dead and injured to DHQ Hospital for postmortem and treatment. However, Azeem and Amir succumbed to their injuries there.

Station House Officer Raja Mussadiq said a murder case has been registered against Chaudhry Shahadat, Chaudhry Arshad and their two unknown accomplices who have gone into hiding.

Police teams were conducting raids at their possible hiding places to arrest them, he said.