Robbers injure two citizens

Two people were shot at for offering resistance to robbers in Quaidabad, the police reported on Sunday.

Police sources said 22-year-old Adnan Ali, son of Muhammad Pervez, and 25-year-old Bilal, son of Inayat, resisted bandits who had held them up at gunpoint near Abbas Memorial Hospital in Quaidabad.

The injured were rushed to a local hospital for treatment. The bandits managed to flee.

The incident came just days after Sindh chief minister directed the police department this past Friday to launch a “decisive and result-oriented” crackdown on street criminals and their abettors. Presiding over a meeting, Murad Ali Shah said the street crime figures he was presented with at the cabinet meeting a day earlier were extremely disturbing. Additional IG Karachi Mushtaq Maher, while presenting comparative figures of street crime collected by the CPLC, said in the year 2015, 92 four-wheelers were stolen in 2015 and the figure came down to 73 in 2016.

In 2015, 762 motorcycles were snatched and the figure dropped slightly to 734 next year.

In 2015, 21,198 mobile phones were snatched and 20,442 stolen. In 2016, 34,137 mobile phones were either snatched or stolen.

The official said in 2016, 1,548 street criminals were arrested. Of them, 14 were convicted and three acquitted. Presently, 1,082 are in jail and 449 are out on bail.

The chief minister said the figures suggested that street crimes continued to persist in the city and the complaints of the citizens were genuine.

IGP AD Khowaja said street crimes and drug addiction were linked and criminals mostly were from slum areas.

He said the sanctioned strength of the Karachi police was 39,589 against which 27,389 were working – a shortfall of 12,200 cops.