Police start hunting for O-Level students who killed classmate

3 boys are in custody, traced with the help of the ransom call for Rs2m.

KARACHI:

The police are looking for two young men, both believed to be O-Level students, suspected of murdering their 17-year-old classmate, whose week-old decomposed body was found in the bushes in DHA Phase VIII on Saturday night.

Ahmed Bilal Macdi, a resident of Phase IV, was killed by a group of classmates and their friends. Two of them are at large, but three boys, Abu Baqar, Sagheer and Sagheer’s brother, are in custody. The police did not want to disclose the names of the two boys who are on the run.

Ahmed’s grief-stricken father Syed Jamal Macdi, who is the finance director at the Pakistan Defence Officers Housing Society, told The Express Tribune that the victim was the youngest of his four siblings.

“I hope justice is done and the murderers get exemplary punishment,” he said. Ahmed Bilal was laid to rest at the Gizri graveyard in Phase IV on Sunday.

Jamal Macdi said his son went missing on July 22 and the family became worried when he didn’t return home after informing his family that he was going out.

Citizens-Police Liason Committee chief Ahmed Chinoy, whose unit played an instrumental role in cracking the case, said that the home minister, Manzoor Wassan, had specifically tasked him to find the teenager, when the family received a ransom call for around Rs2 million.

“Usually in ransom calls, the criminals give a deadline and the destination where the money should be placed. However, in this case there was no such details,” Chinoy said, adding that they then suspected the involvement of Ahmed’s classmates as they were supposedly the last ones with him.

Teenager Abu Baqar, a resident of Shireen Jinnah Colony, was the first one to be picked up after the ransom call was traced. During questioning, he confessed to killing Ahmed Bilal and told the authorities where they had dumped the body. Gizri DSP Zameer Abbasi said the victim was strangled to death and hit over the head with a heavy object like a block. No firearms were used.

The main suspect Abu Baqar is said to be a Hafiz-e Quran and the son of a school teacher.

When asked how the body went undiscovered for eight days, a DHA spokesperson said Phase VIII was a vast area and there were many spots where it could have gone unnoticed. “Like elsewhere in Karachi, you can dump a body in DHA phase VIII without being noticed by anyone,” the CPLC’s Chinoy said, adding that there have been other cases in the past when such bodies were eaten by animals.

The name of the young man’s father was erroneously reported as Jalal in Sunday’s edition of this newspaper.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 1^st, 2011.