8 cops booked for killing rickshaw driver

Fake encounter 

LAHORE

City Raiwind police on September 20 (Tuesday) registered a murder case against eight policemen for killing a rickshaw driver in a fake encounter in 2015 and hushing up the matter by registering a fake case against the victim. 

A police source at Lahore CCPO office told the correspondent that SI Muhammad Yahya and SI Muhammad Rafique along with Ahmad Hassan, Muhammad Younas, Muhammad Asif, Muhammad Qaisar Rashid, Muhammad Haneef and Muhammad Aslam caught a 22-year-old youth identified as Waqas Ahmad, son of Muhammad Ashraf, a rickshaw driver, from a shop at Committee Gharwala Bazaar at 1:30pm on May 5, 2015. Waqas’ family got worried as their son stopped contacting them. They made all out efforts to search him but to no avail.

On August 6, 2015, two people Ibrahim and Munir Ahmad visited the house of victim Waqas, a resident of Mauza Mir Muhammad Police Station Raja Jang, and informed his father Muhammad Ashraf that they were on their way to Jinnah Hospital to inquire after their maternal uncle when they spotted two police personnel carriers and a white colour car zipped past them. The men traveling in the white car stepped out of the vehicle near Kharpa Chak and halted the traffic on a road and the cops travelling in one of the two police personnel carriers stopped the traffic coming from another road. The two police officers identified as SI Yahya and SI Rafique dragged the victim out of the police personnel carrier and shot him to death. The two visitors further told the victim’s father that they had remained tight-lipped due to fear of the police. According to Ashraf, he went to the police station and met the SHO, who told him that his son had died in police custody and an FIR would be registered on the complaint of the police. Ironically, the SHO fabricated a fake story and registered a case (No 725/15) under Sections 302, 324, 353, 427, 186, 187 PPC. Meanwhile, a judicial inquiry was conducted in which statements of the accused police officers and officials and the victim’s father and eye-witnesses were recorded. And subsequently, the judicial magistrate termed the police encounter and the FIR fake. When asked, City Raiwind police said the FIR was registered on September 20, 2016, against the accused cops under Sections 302, 148 and 149 PPC on the complaint of the victim’s father Muhammad Ashraf.