Trigger-happy cops

At the cusp of youth — when one is brimming with the energy to make it big in life — Osama Satti was knocked into eternal slumber, by none other than those who were supposed to act as the custodians of his life. His fault? None, at all! Any proof of the boy’s innocence? Well, yes. An inquiry — carried out by the additional deputy commissioner Islamabad into the January 2^nd killing in the heart of the federal capital — is all over the media, and bares it all.

The details, according to the inquiry report, are horrific. The car Osama was travelling in was stopped and fired at from all sides by the men in uniform — the Crisis Response Team of the Anti-Terrorism Squad to be precise. The poor lad, barely 21, received no less than 22 bullets, and was left to breathe his last on the road instead of being shifted to hospital. That the boy’s parents were not informed of the murder for some four hours and that the bullet shells collected from the crime scene were not sent for forensic inquiry for as many as 72 hours shows the complicity on the part of the investigators. And the most appalling of it all: Osama was found to have no link with any crime whatsoever.

This is, however, not the first incident of an innocent citizen losing his life at the hands of his very own uniformed custodians. The shocking Sahiwal incident of January 2019 is unlikely to have faded from the public memory. A boy, Intezar Ahmed, was also gunned down in Karachi in April 2018 in circumstances similar to those in Osama’s killing.

It goes without saying that our police force is not even a blurred shadow of what it is meant to be i.e. an efficient, trained, trusted and friendly custodian of the public — something that flies in the face of the pledges made by our rulers for remodeling the force to turn it into a modern, efficient and disciplined organisation.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2021.

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