In cold blood: Student stabbed on bus on way home

The family were kept waiting for five hours as police sorted out territorial jurisdiction.

ISLAMABAD:

A student was killed in a clash between two student groups aboard a bus on Friday.

Four undergraduate students — Uzair Aftab, Muhammad Anjum, Muhammad Bilal and Waseem Ahmed —- boarded a bus home from Faizabad Interchange, where they ran into another group of students from the same college.

A verbal exchange of hot words between the two groups escalated, with one of the suspects stabbing Uzair in the chest, police said.

“Our friend was short and the other guy was tall so he drove the dagger straight into Aftab’s heart. [The suspect] threw his body out of the bus and fled along with his friends,” Anjum told the police in his statement later.

The suspects threw the fatally wounded Uzair from the bus and got off. Bilal, Anjum and Ahmed booked a cab and rushed Uzair to the nearby Benazir Bhutto Hospital in Rawalpindi, where doctors pronounced him dead.

The incident was reported to Rescue 15, who circulated the info on wireless. Both the Shehzad Town and Industrial Area police responded to the call.

The Shehzad Town police was the first to come but ended up returning, saying that the crime was not committed in their area. The Industrial Area police came second. They took the body to the PIMS and called Uzair’s family.

What followed for the family was a five-hour-long agonizing wait, with the Industrial Area police refusing to submit a request for autopsy, saying the crime had been committed in the Aabpara police’s jurisdiction.

“The Industrial and Aabpara police were sorting out territorial jurisdiction between them. The incident clearly happened in the area of Industrial area police but the Industrial Area SHO showed it out of his area to avoid taking the case,” said a police official familiar with the case.

The two police stations eventually agreed to go ahead with the post-mortem and that they will decide later about who gets the case.

A subsequent inspection of the crime scene determined that the crime had happened within the jurisdiction of the Industrial Area police. They recorded statements of Uzair’s three friends and allowed them to go home.

A police official from the station said the suspects will be “easily tracked down”.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 29^th, 2012.