Family dispute?: Man granted bail in constable’s murder case

Sessions court bails out suspect against two Rs200,000 sureties.

KARACHI:

A court has granted bail to a suspect accused of murdering a special branch policeman.

Additional district and sessions judge Iqbal Ahmed Khwaja granted bail to Muhammad Arif on Saturday against two sureties of Rs200,000 each. The suspect is being held at Landhi jail over the murder of 47-year-old police constable Tariq Ahmed.

The victim’s brother, Sattar Ahmed, had lodged a murder case (179/ 2011) against unidentified suspects on August 1, 2011, at Sharafi Goth police station. Tariq was shot dead on his way to office by unidentified attackers near Bismillah Mosque in Mansehra Colony.

After four months, Sattar recorded a supplementary statement and nominated his three brothers-in-law, Ameen, Shakil and Abrar, and another relative, Muhammad Arif, as the suspects.

Before Tariq was murdered, he had also registered a case with Sharafi Goth police against the same people, claiming that they had threatened to kill him for marrying for the second time.

The crime branch police arrested Arif from the Swabi district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in January. On February 1, three witnesses identified him before a Malir judicial magistrate. The witnesses stated that they had come forward after seeing a poster asking for help on the murder case.

However, the complainant’s counsel, Nasir Raza Rind, said that the court gave the benefit of the doubt to Arif as Tariq’s wife had stated that he did not murder her husband.

The counsel for the suspect, Khalid Mehmood, told The Express Tribune that the court granted bail as the witnesses withheld information for four months and there were doubts over the identification parade.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 23^rd, 2012.