Life is cheap: Labourer stabs fellow to death over Rs600

Three men murdered near Sabzi Mandi in two days; police yet to arrest suspects

ISLAMABAD: Is Rs600 something to kill another man over? Apparently, this is what happened when a daily-wage labourer lost his cool and stabbed his fellow labourer to death after he allegedly failed to pay the petty amount on time.

The murder was one of three which took place in the capital in the past two days.

According to police 25-year-old Zakirullah was a daily wage labourer hailing from Charsaddah district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. He lived in makeshift arrangements on the footpaths of the capital while searching for work.

He owed Rs600 to a fellow labourer, Israr.

On Friday, Israr approached Zakirullah near the CDA stop on the IJP Road in Sector I-10 and asked him to return his money. But when Zakirullah failed to pay up, Israr killed him.

Zakirullah was rushed to Rawalpindi’s Holy Family Hospital but did not survive.

“Israr stabbed him in the chest which resulted in Zakirullah’s death,” a police officer told The Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity.

Upon investigation, the police discovered that the two labourers had quarrel over the victim not returning Rs600 to the suspect.

A case has been registered against Israr but he has not been traced and arrested yet.

However, this was not the only murder in the Sabzi Mandi area over the past two days.

A man was gunned down by unidentified assailants on the main IJP Road intersection near Sabzi Mandi. Police say the assailants, who have not been identified as yet, pulled up against Akhtar Ali at around 9pm on Thursday evening and killed him with a single bullet to the head.

The same bullet, police said, went on to hit an 18-year-old woman who was passing by on a motorcycle.

Ali was rushed to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences but he died before he could reach the hospital.

The woman was taken to HFH in a critical condition. A police official said she had been hit in the neck and had spent a day unconscious at the hospital.

Sabzi Mandi police have registered separate cases against unidentified gunmen based on complaints from the families of the two victims. They suspect Ali was the victim of a targeted killing, but have yet to make any headway.

Later that same day, a man was gunned down in Sector I-10/1 just along the IJP Road close to the spot Ali was attacked. In this case, the police said that an assailant accompanied by three other unidentified suspects attacked and killed a man. The victim’s wife filed an FIR with the police but no arrests have been made in the case so far.

A police officer told The Express Tribune on Saturday that they could not identify and arrest all the suspects immediately since they had spent the whole day in medico-legal formalities.

Meanwhile, all three cases have been handed over to the recently-established homicide investigation unit of the police.

“The suspects will be traced and arrested soon,” said Sabzi Mandi SHO inspector Arshad Ali.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2016.