Aamir Liaquat laid to rest after children refuse to allow autopsy

Renowned television personality and PTI Member of the National Assembly Dr Aamir Liaquat Hussain was laid to rest on Friday afternoon. People from different walks of life and his family members attended the funeral prayers led by his son Ahmed Aamir.

Former Sindh governor Imran Ismail, PTI MPA Khurrum Sher Zaman, Jamal

Siddiqui, MQM-Pakistan Tanzeem Bahali Committee’s Dr Farooq Sattar and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s Nehal Hashmi also joined the last rites.

Hussain was later laid to rest at a compound of the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine in Clifton as per his will. He had already booked a grave there in his lifetime as his father Sheikh Liaquat Hussain and mother Mahmooda Sultana are also buried there.

Social worker Ramzan Chhipa performed the ghusl of the late PTI MNA. The funeral prayers were delayed due to a dispute over the post-mortem examination of the late lawmaker as the police insisted on conducting an autopsy to ascertain the cause of his sudden death and they were not handing the body over to the family. However, Hussain’s children refused to allow an autopsy. They said they would not allow an autopsy as they wanted to bade farewell to their father with respect and dignity.

The funeral prayers had to be offered after the Friday prayers but due to the dispute, they were offered after the Asr prayers when the children approached a judicial magistrate against the police’s decision to hold an autopsy, due to which the process to ascertain the cause of death under the section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure was stopped.

Earlier, the Brigade police station had written a letter to the Chhipa Welfare Association asking it to not hand over the body of Hussain to anyone else besides police. “The body of Aamir Liaquat should not be handed over to anyone else. The body has been handed over to your mortuary as trust. It will be received by the staff of the Brigade police station. It must not be handed over to anyone else. Legal action will be taken if the body is handed over to anyone else. The post-mortem of the body of Aamir Liaquat Hussain is necessary. It is not possible to determine the cause of the death without post-mortem of the body,” read the letter written by the police to the incharge of the Chhipa Welfare Association’s morgue.

50-year-old Hussain was living with his two domestic servants at his residence in Karachi’s Khudadad Colony. His domestic staff broke open his room's door when they did not receive any reply from him for a long period. He was then brought to a hospital where doctors pronounced him dead.

The police received the first information around 1pm from one of his servants. Investigators also seized Hussain’s mobile phone and a tablet. They are also examining footage recorded by CCTV cameras installed at his residence and its surroundings.