Murder case of educationist Khalid Raza registered

Police have registered a case of the targeted killing of educationist Syed Khalid Raza in Karachi’s Gulistan-e-Jauhar area.

The case was registered late on Monday night at the Gulistan-e-Jauhar police station on a complaint from Raza’s elder brother, Tanvir Raza, against unknown suspects. Police have placed Section 302/34 of the Pakistan Penal Code in the FIR.

The victim was shot and killed outside his house at 8:12pm on Sunday by two motorcycle riders. The victim’s brother told The News that he heard the sound of gunfire and noise started in the street. He said that when he came out of the house, his brother was lying in a pool of blood and had passed away.

“The police and officials from different intelligence agencies are visiting us and we are cooperating with them as much as we can,” Tanvir Raza said. “My brother, accompanied by a family member, was leaving to attend a birthday ceremony of someone, when as soon as he came out of the house, the assailants targeted him.”

He further said that a niece of the victim was also standing at the gate when his brother was shot dead in front of her. “I was making ablution when the niece started shouting that ‘chachu’ has been killed on the road,” Tanvir narrated.

He said Khalid Raza was shot once in his head from the back and the bullet exited from the front. “The assailant had already taken their position there and were waiting for him,” he explained. “As soon as Khalid turned to see the niece standing at the door, one of them opened fire at him without giving a chance to retaliate or save himself.”

The investigators collected some CCTV footage that could help them in tracing the suspects. According to investigators, some of the footages obtained from houses in nearby streets had proved helpful to identify the suspects’ faces and their escape route. “It has been confirmed that the attackers were already present there and they did their activity with proper recce,” a senior police officer privy to the matter said. “We are also looking for the geo-fencing.”

In replying to a question about the possible involvement of the neighbouring country’s spy agency involvement behind the target killing, Tanvir said his brother was a social activist and the police and other agencies were investigating to ascertain the actual motive behind the incident.

Raza, the Karachi region deputy director of the Dar-e-Arqam Schools and the vice chairman of the Federation of Private Schools, was shot dead shortly after leaving his house and moving towards his car.

Police believe that the killer was a sharpshooter. They said the assailant had used a 30-bore pistol in the incident, and they had found a single empty bullet casing of a 30-bore pistol at the crime scene and sent it to the forensic division of the Sindh police for ballistics cross-matching.

According to the forensic report, the casing had no previous record, suggesting that the weapon used in the incident had never been used in any other incident before. Police suspect that India’s foreign intelligence agency, the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), facilitated a local group in the murder, as the Sindhudesh Revolutionary Army (SRA) had claimed responsibility for the incident, saying that Raza was a former commander of the Kashmir freedom fighters group Al-Badr.

Earlier, On February 21, Hizbul Mujahideen commander Bashir Ahmed Pir, alias Imtiaz Alam, had been killed in Rawalpindi by unidentified gunmen. Moreover, Zahid Akhund of Jaish-e-Muhammad had been killed in Karachi’s Mehmoodabad neighbourhood last year.