Man convicted of kidnapping, killing friend; jailed for life

Convict wanted funds to pull his gym out of financial losses, another accused released for want of evidence

KARACHI:

The East model court awarded a life sentence on Tuesday to a man convicted of kidnapping and murdering a 22-year-old youth in 2015.

The judge found Noman Qureshi guilty as charged of conspiring, kidnapping and killing Bilal Rizwan in November 2015. However, the other accused in the case, Adeelur Rehman, was released due to the lack of evidence against him.

The court also ordered Qureshi to pay Rs1 million to the heirs of Rizwan, who was killed by people he considered his friends.

Rizwan, a 22-year-old resident of Al-Falah society in District East, was kidnapped on November 4, 2015. He was murdered the same day but for his family he remained missing. His mutilated and charred body was found nearly a month after his kidnapping, on December 12, 2015, but no one recognised that it was Rizwan.

The case was cracked by the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) in 2017. The FIRs pertaining to his kidnapping and the recovery of an unidentified body were registered at the same police station but no one figured out that the victim was one and the same, as his body was completely burnt.

The killers were not strangers to Rizwan. They were his own friends who kidnapped and killed him in order to get ransom money. Rehman was angry at Rizwan for being friends with his sister while Qureshi wanted cash to pull his gym out of financial losses, it emerged.

They had killed Rizwan on the same day they had kidnapped him, but never told the family.

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The killers first hid the body of the deceased at Qureshi's gym, but when the stench grew unbearable, they burnt it and threw it in a garbage dump.

The Al-Falah Police found the body, but there was no physical identification, so a case was registered against unidentified persons on behalf of the state.

The case went to CTD in 2016 and during the course of investigation they again questioned the suspects who had earlier picked up and interrogated by the police and the Sindh Rangers. A major breakthrough in the case came when the CTD asked the right questions and managed to find Rizwan's two missing mobile phones and SIMs, and subsequently found incriminating evidence against the suspects.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 4^th, 2021.