Another doctor killed

While investigations are still underway, from the nature of the murder — nothing was stolen and the doctor was shot several times as his car slowed down over a speed bump — it is clear that Dr Imran Wasi was yet another victim of the monster of target killing that has engulfed Karachi. According to his family, the doctor, who had been working at Lyari General Hospital for the past 15 years, had previously expressed concern about working in the area, and had hinted at wanting a transfer from the hospital. His family believes that he was targeted because he was an Urdu-speaking doctor. Last year, at least nine doctors were killed in the city, according to the Pakistan Medical Association’s (PMA) Karachi chapter. And with this latest killing, residents of a Karachi neighbourhood known for its declining healthcare facilities have been deprived of an ENT specialist.

Moreover, the inefficiency of the police in securing the safety of doctors is obvious by the fact that at least two police vans had been deputed near the crime scene, apart from two policemen who were deployed for duty at a nearby shop. When one compares this to the ‘efficiency’ the police showed in arresting hundreds of people for violating a pillion-riding ban — which was announced late in the night, meaning that many of those arrested did not even know about it — it becomes quite evident that our law-enforcement agencies have their priorities completely wrong.

It is shameful that the city cannot protect its care-givers, who fall to bullets because the state that is supposed to protect them has miserably failed in its primary responsibility. Following the killing, the out-patients department of three major government hospitals in the city were shut down in protest and the PMA plans to take out a protest rally on January 29. The city’s doctors are angry and afraid and they have every right to be — the provincial government and the police have stood by as silent spectators as the target killers have gone about doing what they do best with impunity. Only recently, the city police claimed to have arrested killers of city doctors but one doesn’t know what became of these arrests. Were the suspects eventually charged for the crimes that the police accused them of, or was this yet another exercise in inefficiency?

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd,  2011.