Two people were killed and another wounded when the funeral prayers of an alleged robber who was killed by a mob in a vigilante justice came under heavy fire in the Qasba Colony area of Orangi Town on Monday evening.
Police said an alleged robber, Bilal, was beaten to death and two of his companions were injured late on Sunday night in Qasba Colony by a crowd that claimed that they were robbers. The police managed to rescue two of the suspected robbers in an injured state. The casualties were taken to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for an autopsy and medical treatment.
Initially, the police also confirmed that the men killed and injured by the mob were robbers but the family and relatives of Bilal denied that he was a robber. The situation, however, turned tense and complicated when the relatives of the deceased man came under fire by unidentified suspects while they were staging a protest on a road with the body following the funeral prayers.
As a result of the firing, three of the protesters were seriously wounded. They were shifted to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital where two of them succumbed to their injuries. One of them was identified as Suleman, 17, who was a close relative of Bilal. The other person killed in the firing was an elderly man whose identify is yet to be ascertained.
The third man injured in the firing incident was a disabled person, Waqas. Some witnesses claimed that around five police mobile vehicles were present during the protest but the firing occurred, it resulted in a chaos and the police vehicles also disappeared.
Those witnesses claimed that Bilal was not a robber and he was killed by a rival group who misled the police by painting him as a robber. They added that the protesters were shot by unidentified men from a nearby building.
The situation was tense till the filing of this story. Meanwhile, a heavy contingent of law enforcers, including police and the Rangers, had arrived in the area to control the situation. In the late hours of Sunday, Bilal had been killed and two of his companions injured after a crowd severely beat them up in Qasba Colony. Those in the mob claimed that they had caught the three men red-handed while they were trying to rob a person.
Relatives of the suspected robber claimed that Bilal was a resident of the same area and he and his friends had come out of their house after hearing gunshots to see what had happened when the mob caught them and started beating them up.
The News made multiple attempts to get the police version about Bilal and whether a rival group had been behind his murder and later firing at the protesters after his funeral prayers, but no police officer was available for comments.
However, Karachi police chief Javed Alam Odho took notice of the incident and stated that the police were monitoring the situation. The Karachi additional IG also constituted a high-level committee headed by the Criminal Investigation Agency DIG and the District West investigation SSP and District Central SSP as its other members. The committee has been tasked with investigating the case and preparing a comprehensive report.
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