Two granted pre-arrest bail in school principal murder case

KARACHI: A local court granted bail before arrest on Saturday to two co-accused, Gul Nawaz and his son Danish, in a school principal’s murder case.

Nawaz and Danish had moved bail applications saying that they feared they could be arrested by the police in the December 9 murder case of Ambreen Fatima, the headmistress of a private school.

The two men requested the court of the additional district & sessions judge (East) to grant them bail before arrest. They were granted bail in the sum of Rs30,000 each and comments were summoned from the investigating officer and the state attorney.

The court also directed Nawaz and Danish to record their statements before the IO. The next hearing of the case has been fixed to be held on January 8.

Ambreen Fatima was shot dead in the wee hours of December 9 when she was returning home, located in the Soldier Bazaar locality, with her husband Ali Hassan from their relatives’ event.

FIR No 299/17 was registered at the Soldier Bazaar police station under Section 302, read with Section 34, of the Pakistan Penal Code on the complaint of Ambreen’s husband against unidentified suspects.

Hassan, the husband, had initially told the police that his wife was gunned down by unidentified men while he resisted their attempt to rob the couple.

During the course of investigation, the police learnt that the incident did not occur how the husband had described it to them and that the woman had been murdered.

When the investigators started suspecting Hassan’s involvement in the murder, they picked him up for questioning. During the police interrogation, the man confessed to murdering his wife.

Later, an informant spotted a man standing near the Jumman Shah Bukhari shrine on Nishtar Road and claimed that he was carrying a pistol that was used in Ambreen’s murder.

A police party was immediately despatched to the spot, from where they caught the man and confiscated the weapon he was carrying. The suspect disclosed his identity as Bilal Shams.

Police searched Shams and seized a 30-bore pistol with the weapon’s licence from him. The licence was registered in the name of Gul Nawaz. Shams told the police that he had provided the pistol to his sister Sehar, who had passed it on to Hassan.

According to Shams, he had got the weapon from his friend Danish, Nawaz’s son. Shams and Danish are policemen, the latter of whom is still a trainee.

Shams told the police that Danish was fond of carrying a weapon with him and that he kept a licensed weapon of his father with him at all times.

Shams had asked Danish for the pistol after Sehar, Shams’s sister, had requested him to provide her with a weapon to give to Hassan for aerial firing.