Year after year somehow the same set of events lead to the encounter between law enforcers and law breakers.
There is a perception that these scripts are written before a fake encounter is staged and released for the consumption of the masses. For example, the police stops some suspicious people approaching a picket, following which they open fire on the police party. The police retaliate and kill the suspicious people on the spot. Not a single victim survives to answer questions and face investigations. Only one or two of them manage to escape, sometimes.
Often the criminals or terrorists are said to be freed from police custody by their companions after attacking on the vehicles carrying them from jail to the court or vice versa.
Sometimes, the prisoners are taken out from the jail for the recovery of weapons, looted money and goods or identification of their un-arrested accomplices. During these journeys, their companions attack the police vehicles with such precision that only the criminals are hit by the bullets and the policemen sitting with them stay unharmed.
There are cases whose story is simple. Criminals under custody snatch weapons from policemen and fire shots at them. The retaliatory fire by other policemen finishes them instantly.
Human rights activists and police officers who do not approve of the idea of fake encounters say that when suspects die in police custody, the concerned policemen claim to have shot them in self-defence.
They may place weapons near the dead bodies to provide justification for killing the individuals. In such cases, police can first claim that the said criminal had escaped and later announce to have killed him in an encounter.
The latest additions have been terms like "half fry" and "full fry" in Sindh, especially Hyderabad. The former is used when an alleged criminal is injured by the police by shooting in his legs and the latter is used when he is killed during a raid or in custody.
Read also:Encounters with death
A Lahore-based journalist who covered police action against the notorious "top ten" gangsters of the city during late 1980s and early 1990s, tells TNS that those were the days when the police would act without an iota of fear. "There were incidents where criminals were presented before the media in handcuffs and the next day they would be killed in police encounters."
"There were ‘encounter specialists’ who would proudly announce the number of people they had killed. In fact, they had not killed all the criminals that they claimed. They would simply offer to claim all such killings as those who had actually killed criminals did not want to be identified out of fear of retaliation and enmity with their heirs."
Of late, medico-legal officers’ protests have created problems for the police and raised questions about encounters. In a press conference held on February 22, 2015, the medico-legal officer at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), Dr Shehzad Ali, termed most of the police encounters in the city as extrajudicial killings. The press conference was called immediately after he was released after being allegedly kidnapped and tortured by police personnel.
Dr Nisar Ali Shah, a medico-legal officer at the Civil Hospital Karachi, claimed that the police department often demanded of them to tamper with the findings of autopsy reports. He said the police would force them to write that the said criminal was shot from a distance of 10 feet even if he had been shot at point-blank range.