Late night gun shots in isolated parts of Bund Road are not a rarity for the locals. They can now identify these as the noise created by some sort of police ‘encounter’ in the area. Their perception is substantiated, shortly afterwards, as different news channels start playing tickers of the same. Oh, a ‘dacoit’ on the run was killed as the police hounded him out!
This year, so far, Lahore has seen at least three prominent incidents in which the deceased were not dacoits or robbers but some random individuals apprehended on the (alleged) charge of murder. Sadly, their fate was sealed without them being allowed to go through any judicial proceedings.
More recently, a few days before the Eid holidays, three people, including a bank manager, were killed and four others injured when an armed man opened indiscriminate fire inside the said bank near the busy Karim Block Market in Allama Iqbal Town.
As the story goes, the accused assailant, named Muhammad Abdullah, who was also a cashier at the Government Science College, was injured when one of the bank’s guards and some locals retaliated. Police later said the motive behind the attack was some personal dispute with the bank manger, and nothing else. The next day, the local new channels reported that the attacker had been killed in an alleged police encounter.
According to some police officials, the attacker was taken to trace his accomplices near Bund Rd when the latter opened fire at the police. Meanwhile, the attacker tried to escape from the scene and was killed in reactionary firing.
Earlier, in March this year, former security guard at a showroom in Johar Town killed three car dealers. Relatives of the killed, together with the officer-bearers of the Lahore Traders Association, blocked the roads in protest, demanding immediate arrest of the culprits. A few days later, Ghulam Abbas, the accused, was reportedly killed in a police encounter. The police claimed that Abbas had returned to his workplace with the possible intention to kill more people but was gunned down in a clash.
In the first week of January, a seven years old boy was found dead in a mosque after a horrendous act of sodomy was committed on him in Green Town area. The boy’s body was found hanging from a staircase on the crime scene, his left hand tied to his back.
The deceased was identified as Moeen, a resident of the same locality. A few days later, the prime suspect in the incident -- Shoaib, a teenager -- was also killed during a foiled ‘escape bid,’ as he was being shifted to an anti-terrorism court (ATC), media reports said.
"It seems the province has become a police state," says Muhammad Imtiaz, a 50-year-old, small businessman whose residence is on Bund Rd. "The police can get away with killing anybody by declaring them robbers or dacoits."
Imtiaz demands accountability for these encounters. He also asks as to why the democratically elected government has not taken notice of such encounters that have become a routine in the city. "It is alarming that the law enforcing agencies have been given a free hand to decide the fate of the criminals instead of presenting the accused in the court of law."
In 2013, the residents of Kahna, on Ferozpur Road, protested repeatedly for staging fake encounters in their area. The protesters chanted slogans against the police, exhorting the government to immediately check the policy of extra-judicial killings.
According to some media reports, more than 176 alleged criminals were killed in different police shootouts the same year.
Shaukat Javed, former police chief of the Punjab, says a police encounter, if it is actually false as alleged, is illegal. "The alleged extra-judicial killings put a big question mark on the existing criminal justice system," he tells TNS. "No government has ever felt the need to overhaul the system."
Javed says the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has clearly asked for a revamp of the criminal justice system but no progress has made in this connection.
He also states that the problem cannot be addressed without comprehensively revamping the existing police, making it fully independent, and activating the public safety commission at a local level in an effective manner.
"At the moment, there is little or no accountability mechanism. There is a perception that because of the faulty criminal justice system, the culprits are able to avoid the courts. That could be a reason for the ‘encounters.’ Whereas the political will might have tacit approval of these things for appeasement of the public, such encounters are actually adding to violence in the society and making the criminals more hardened.
"We are institutionalising violence in this way," he adds.
Different human rights organisations have been expressing a serious concern over the increasing number of police encounters, not only in Lahore but in other cities of the country too. A recent report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) says there has been an increase by over 63 percent in the number of people killed in encounters with personnel of law enforcement agencies in the first quarter of 2015 as compared to the first two months of 2014.