Kidnap and murder case solved as body of victim killed in Gulshan last year found

The Rangers force on Saturday claimed to have solved a blind kidnap and murder case by arresting a suspect, who had reportedly killed a man with the help of a Karachi cop in April, 2017.

According to a spokesperson for the force, the suspect Syed Ali was arrested and on his confession, the remains of the victim Azfar Imtiaz were recovered from a house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal.

The spokesperson said in January 2017, the two suspects – Ali and a cop, Sub Inspector Asif Usman – rented a shop on the front of a house on Rashid Minhas Road to run it as a showroom.

He added that they then began devising a strategy to murder Imtiaz with whom they had developed differences over a “petty issue”. As per the spokesperson, the two hired a mason to dig a five to six foot-deep ditch in the kitchen of the house. On April 5, 2017 they allegedly called Imtiaz to the showroom, tranquilised him and strangled him to death. They then buried his body in the ditch and “renovated the kitchen floor with tiles,” he said.

The spokesman further said police had arrested Ali on April 6, while investigating Imtiaz’s disappearance, but a court had released him on May 28 due to insufficient evidence against him. Ali then vacated the showroom and later the house owner sold it to a family.

He added that Imtiaz’s family filed an application with the Rangers on January 30, 2018 and requested them to reinvestigate Imtiaz’s disappearance case. Subsequently an investigation was launched and with the help of information and technical monitoring, the Rangers, in a joint raid with police, rearrested Ali, who confessed to Imtiaz’s murder during interrogation.

On Ali’s information, Rangers and police raided the house where Imtiaz’s body was buried during the night between Friday and Saturday. They exhumed his body and handed it over to the police along with Ali for further investigation.

Woman shot dead

Meanwhile, a 19-year-old woman was shot dead by unidentified armed assailants in her house in New Mianwali Colony on Saturday.

According to Orangi Division SP Abid Ali Baloch, the assailants opened fire at Reema, wife of Ismail, and escaped from the house.

Her body was taken to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for a post-mortem, which revealed that a single bullet to the head caused her death.

The motive behind the murder had not been ascertained by the time this report was filed.

Police handed over her body to the family and began an investigation.