Bodies of missing journalist, friend found
Salis bin Perwaiz
Karachi: Police found the bullet-riddled bodies of a journalist and his friend dumped under the Love Lane Bridge in Pak Colony early on Wednesday morning.
The bodies were shifted to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, where post-mortems showed the two were severely tortured before being killed. Bullet wounds to their heads were described as the cause of death.
Although no identification cards were found on them, the bodies were later identified as those of Tariq Kamal, a journalist of a local daily, who had been working on an exclusive story in Vinder, Balochistan, and his friend, Fawad Sheikh, who had accompanied him to the volatile area.
Police found that FIRs for two missing people had been lodged at the Defence and Gulshan-e-Iqbal police stations.“On Wednesday afternoon, a man named Talha, whose brother had been missing for the past five days, came to identify the two bodies,” said Station House Officer (SHO) Saleem Khan of Pak Colony police station.
He was taken to the hospital where he identified the bodies to be of his elder brother and his friend. Speaking to The News, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Amir Farooqi of District West said Kamal was a newspaper reporter and resident of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, while Sheikh lived in Defence and ran a leather business in Korangi.
“The younger brother, Talha, told us that Kamal had left home some five days ago for Vinder, Balochistan, to work on an exclusive report,” SSP Farooqi said. The SSP said the family had talked to Kamal on the phone the day after he had left for Vinder, but after that there was no contact.
Worried, the families of the two men lodged complaints of their missing in their areas. “But late on Tuesday night, the family got a call from Kamal, who sounded disheartened, and informed them that it was his last call, as his captives were about to kill him in a few moments. He said they were being killed on the orders of a sardar.”
The call was made from Kamal’s cell phone number, after which the phone was switched off. Investigators said the police were trying to retrieve cell phone records of the two, and investigating the locations they travelled to.
They said they had received the initial medical report and been waiting for forensic reports. Talha’s statement would have been helpful for police investigations if Kamal had named the sardar on whose orders he had been killed.
In a separate incident, the body of a 40-year-old man was found near a garbage dump in Moosa Lane on Wednesday morning.Mohammad, son of Yunus, was shot dead after being tortured by his kidnappers.
SHO Ali Raza of the Baghdadi police station said that the body was shifted to the Civil Hospital Karachi. After a message was conveyed through the police control and coordination system, a family, which approached the Baghdadi police in the evening, was taken to the CHK where they identified the deceased.
The victim was a resident of Parsi Mohallah, Soldier Bazaar, and owned a prize bonds’ shop in Mithadar. Late on Tuesday night, he was abducted when he was on his way back home. Police said the family denied having any enmity. They said the murder was being probed from every angle, including extortion threats.
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