KARACHI, May 20: A closed-circuit television camera recorded a targeted killing of a policeman executed close to M.A Jinnah Road on Tuesday evening.

Assistant Sub-Inspector Shoaib Sardar, 35, of traffic police had just reported for duty at a traffic kiosk close to the Kandawala Building when two assailants on a motorcycle shot him dead in a targeted attack. The assailants appeared professional killers as it took them just seven seconds to fire six bullets and escape, police said.

The ASI, who had earlier served in defunct district central, was transferred to the traffic police from the operation branch of the police about a year ago.

A senior police officer said, “He was perhaps one of the few low-ranking police officers left alive who performed their duties during the Karachi Operation.” The assailants seemed so trained that the commission of crime took only seven seconds. They fired six shots all hitting the ASI in the upper part of the body, causing his instant death, the officer said.

Police have retrieved the incident’s video footage from a nearby installed camera of a private bank. The footage shows that the two assailants in white shirts came from M.A Jinnah Road as the traffic heading towards the Bambino Cinema came to a halt while traffic coming from M.A. Jinnah Road took a right turn towards Garden.

The case’s investigation was assigned to the superintendent police of the Special Investigation Unit. Several officers who took part in the Karachi Operation have been killed during the last few years.

A police official said nearly 90 high-profile cases, including those of several policemen, had been pending with the police. One of the pending cases was that of DSP Karachi Central Jail Amanullah Khan Niazi, who was gunned down in June 2006 in an ambush attack, just a few yards away from Tuesday’s crime scene.

Found dead

Two persons were killed in different parts of the city in the small hours of Tuesday.

Police found the body of an unidentified man, bearing a single bullet wound, dumped on the Slaughter House Road. The body was shifted to the civil hospital, where legal formalities were carried out. Police said that the body was later sent to an Edhi morgue as it remained unidentified.

In New Karachi, police recovered a body stuffed in a gunny bag in Sector 5-D. The body bore torture marks and multiple bullet wounds, police said, adding that they shifted the body to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for a post-mortem examination. It was later shifted to an Edhi morgue.