Four gunned down in ambush

Victims, including two siblings, were on their way to Gujranwala

SHEIKHUPURA:

Four people, including two brothers, were killed by unidentified gunmen near Kala Shah Kaku on the Grand Trunk Road in Sheikhupura on Wednesday.

The victims, Aqeel, Kashif, Qasim and Khalid, came under attack when they had been on their way in their car to Gujranwala from Lahore, said the District Police Officer of Sheikhupura, Faisal Mukhtar.

The accused escaped after the incident. The whole area thundered with the roar of the bullet fires.

A woman passerby was so overwhelmed by the terror created by the assailants that she fell down unconscious. She sustained some minor injuries. Others lied flat on the footpath to save their lives.

Police and Rescue 1122 team arrived at the crime scene and had the bodies shifted to the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital for postmortem.

A team of forensic experts collected evidence from the crime scene.

The district police officer said that Sheikhupura and all the districts surrounding it had been cordoned off to arrest the accused.

The IGP of Punjab sought a report from the RPO of Sheikhupura Range and ordered immediate arrest of the accused.

On May 22, two men travelling in a car were shot dead in Chichwatni in broad daylight, police said.

Mian Abdul Wahab, along with his friend, Usman Jutt, had been on his way to the Housing Colony from Gujjar Chowk when three motorcycle riders who were chasing the car opened fire at it with 30-bore pistols.

The bullets hit the rear of the car, and it plowed into another car parked at the roadside.

Finding their targets sitting ducks, the motorcycle riders opened fire on the two youths, killing them on the spot. The CCTV footage showed the assailants fleeing after having shot their victims. The footage also shows them firing in the air to create scare.

Fear and panic spread in the area after the horrific double-murder incident.

A heavy contingent of police, led by the DSP of Chichawatni, Meher Muhammad Waseem, and the SHO of City Police Station, Mirza Aslam, rushed to the spot and collected evidence.

The bodies were shifted to the THQ Hospital. After the incident, relatives of the victims staged a protest demonstration at the Southern Bypass which led to long queues of vehicles on both sides of the road.

They called off the protest after senior police officials assured them that the accused would be arrested soon.

In November last year, four of a family, including two children, were gunned down by unidentified motorcyclists in a village near Ferozwala in Shiekhupura district.

The victims, Shahnawaz, a resident of Batapur in Lahore, his wife, Zainab Awan, and their two daughters had been travelling in a car which was attacked by armed men.

As a result of the firing, the couple sitting in the front seats and the young girls in the back seats died on the spot. According to eyewitness accounts, unidentified motorcyclists intercepted the family on a road and opened fire at them.

The attackers fled immediately after killing the family.

People present nearby rushed to the spot after witnessing the attack. When they opened the doors of the vehicle, the victims were lying in pools of blood.

An official said that when the eyewitnesses approached the vehicle, they did not notice any movement in the victims’ bodies. They checked the pulse and breathing of the victims, but found them dead.

The witnesses said the man was lying dead in the driving seat, the woman in the passenger’s seat. Both had been shot in the head.

One of the minor girls was sitting in the back seat and the other lying behind the driver’s seat.

“It looked like she was shot while attempting to slide under the seat of her father to take shelter,” an investigator told The Express Tribune.

The investigator said it looked like a cold-blooded murder, probably by some hit-men.

“The suspects had not resorted to firing a volley of bullets but had shot at the most vulnerable parts of the bodies of the victims,” he said.

Initial police investigations had suggested that the victims might have been murdered over an enmity.

Police took the bodies to a morgue for autopsy and collected forensic evidence from the crime scene. Punjab Inspector General of Police (IGP) Rao Sardar Ali Khan took notice of the incident and asked the RPO of Sheikhupura to submit a report.

“The investigation should be completed as soon as possible while keeping in view all the aspects of the case and the killers should be arrested and sentenced,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 9^th, 2022.