Car used in additional SHO’s killing ‘snatched a day before’

As investigations continued into the Khalid Bin Waleed Road robbery that eventually resulted in the martyrdom of Gulistan-e-Jauhar Additional SHO Rahim Khan in an encounter, it emerged on Saturday that the car from which the robbers fired shots at the officer had been snatched at gunpoint a day earlier, and the robbers had changed its number plate overnight the following day.

Though the police claimed to have injured all the four suspects in the car, investigators failed to trace and arrest them despite the passage of 24 hours.

The white Toyota Corolla had been snatched at gunpoint in Block 14 of Gulistan-e-Jauhar on September 24 at around 8am when the car owner, Junaid, who is a banker, had left his home after dropping his children at school. “Three armed men also kidnapped me in my own car, but they left me after a short distance from Safoora Chowrangi and sped away,” Junaid told the investigators. “The suspects were clad in Shalwar Kameez. They put my head down when I tried to offer resistance.”

The car owner further said: “They asked if a tracker was installed in the car and dropped me when I told them the car had no tracker.”

Interestingly, Junaid had immediately informed the police and registered an FIR (No. 691/2020) at the Gulistan-e-Jauhar police station the same day, but the police did not take a case seriously, which eventually resulted in the robbers using it to commit crimes.

“The increase in the car snatching incidents in the city shows that the Karachi police lacks efficiency to stop such crimes,” says a citizen who had lost his vehicle a few months ago. “The police do not take such matters seriously. And I was told by security officials from another province that the car had been traced and I thus found it. The Karachi police had bene hopeless since the day when my car had been stolen in Gulshan-e-Iqbal.”

He said that if in this case, the police took the matter seriously and had made efforts to trace it quickly, their own department’s police officer, Additional SHO Rahim Khan, would have been alive today.

When Gulistan-e-Jauhar SHO Enayat Marwat was asked how the gangs used stolen cars with changed number plates so conveniently the very next day, he replied that it was not something unusual.

Investigators claimed to have made a major breakthrough in the probe. “We have reached very close to the gang,” said SHO Marwat. “Basically, they are dacoits and this is an interprovincial gang.”

It was reported that one of the suspects was in police uniform and they had a Kalashnikov with them. “We have found a magazine of the Kalashnikov in the car, which suggested that they had a Kalashnikov with them and one of them wore a police tracksuit,” said DSP Iqbal Sheikh.

It was also learnt that this was the same group that used to loot big amounts of cash at gunpoint from people coming out of the money changers and banks in Karachi in 2018. However, the DSP and the SHO said they are working on the case and soon all the four injured persons would be arrested soon.