KARACHI, April 18 Due to the callous attitude of authorities concerned, suicide cases go under-reported at the city's public sector hospitals and the police department does not include suicide data in its annual compilation of statistics, it has emerged.

Despite carrying out legal formality under Section 174 of the criminal procedure code of each suicide case, police do not enter suicide data in their annual tabulation of crime figures, apparently ruling it out as a crime.

Generally, suicide figures are considered a barometer of the socio-economic conditions of a society. But irrespective of the government in power, official functionaries always seem to downplay suicide cases.

There is already a paucity of data on suicide and official statistics on suicide and national rates are unknown.

Similarly, the medico-legal office also seems to have not been able to develop proper methodical means of compiling data on suicides.

The data compiled by the office of the police surgeon is also not authentic since often the medico-legal officers treat the cases of hanging as suicides.

The data is colleted from the three medico-legal centers located at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), Civil Hospital Karachi CHK and Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.

“We generally treat cases of hangings as suicide,” said Dr Hamid Pariyar, a police surgeon. Answering a question that what happens in the cases of consuming poison, the police surgeon said “We cannot categorise the case till the receipt of the chemical report.”

A follow-up to such cases does not take place in view of lack of interest, meagre human resources and workload, a senior medico-legal officer admitted.

It takes months for the chemical examiner office to issue a simple report of toxicology.

The under-reporting of suicide cases is evident from the fact that a negligible number of cases have been treated as suicide cases at the CHK during 2009, it transpired that only six cases were treated as suicides there, which were predominantly of hanging.

Similarly, during 2008, only four suicide cases were taken as suicides at the CHK, record of the police surgeon office showed.

The data of the two other public sector hospitals was not available at the police surgeon office.

Police carry out legal formality of Section 174 of the CrPC filling out a form and report to a magistrate saying that there seems no wrongdoing and there is no need for an inquest.

Similarly, if a suicide takes place in a jail or police custody, legal formality of Section 176 of the CrPC is carried out by the police.

Similarly, often there is a 'suicide note' found at the scene generally left by the victim taking the responsibility of his or her act.

But it's rare that police approach an expert to determine the authenticity of the note.

Similarly, if a person has used a pistol to shoot himself, it rarely happens that the police approach the ballistic and finger-printing expert to obtain opinion which could determine if the person had used the pistol on himself or there was some foul play behind the death.

Essentially, the suicide case is taken very casually by the police and they never consider a suicide a case fit enough to focus their energy on it, observed a senior police officer.

However, despite carrying out legal formalities of every suicide case, at the end of the year while tabulating the data police fail to grasp the importance of suicide data.

SSP for Investigation Niaz Ahmed Khosa told Dawn that police data was compiled from the number of registered FIRs, whereas in case of suicide, entry is made in the daily diary (roznamcha) of the police station.

There are 46 different heads of different crime under which data is tabulated, he added.

However, SSP Khosa admitted the importance of suicide data and suggested that a head for suicide could be marked to determine the accurate number of suicide cases taking place in the city.