Another driver of ride-hailing service shot dead

A man working for a ride-hailing service was gunned down in the Buffer Zone locality of the city late on Saturday night. Police identified the Uber driver as 45-year-old Shahnawaz.

District Central Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Dr Rizwan said they received information of a gun attack in Sector 15A-3 of Buffer Zone in North Nazimabad, falling under the jurisdiction of the Taimuria police station.

SSP Rizwan said that acting on the information received, police mobiles were despatched to the scene of the crime, adding that law enforcers took the victim to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

During their initial investigation, police found that the victim, a resident of New Karachi who had retired from the Pakistan International Airlines, was in Buffer Zone when hitherto unidentified assailants fired gunshots on him and escaped from the scene of the attack.

Police said the victim had suffered three bullets in all – two to the head and another to the chest. They said they had recovered the spent bullet shells of 30-bore pistols from the scene of the crime and despatched them to the forensic division of the Sindh police for examination.

The District Central SSP said the police had not found any mobile phone on the person of the victim, which had led them to suspect that the man was gunned down during an incident of mugging.

The officer, however, has his doubts. He said it was rare for a mugging victim to be shot in the head and in the chest as opposed to in the arm or on other parts of the body. He said it was too early to reach a conclusion because the police investigation was still in its initial stages, adding that shops in the area were closed at the time of the attack so there were no eyewitnesses.

He also said police were still working on finding the CCTV camera footage of the incident, adding that since Uber’s office was closed because of it being Sunday, police were yet to retrieve information on the driver to ascertain who had called him to Buffer Zone.

The exact picture of the murder case shall be cleared on Monday when the required data is retrieved from the relevant offices, said the officer, adding that police had registered a case and were investigating it.