Lyari mystery: Surviving twin makes it out of surgery after attack

Haider Qadri is being kept at an undisclosed facility as the family has gone underground.

KARACHI: It took five hours in the operation theatre on Tuesday to begin fixing Haider Qadri’s jawbone fracture left by the bullet that went through his face.

The 23-year-old was attacked with his identical twin, Jamal, on January 2 at the entry of Bihar Colony on the fringe of Lyari. Jamal did not make it. And thus, the Kalri police station registered its first homicide case of the year in their names.

Perhaps FIR No. 01 of 2013 mentions that two constables were standing just a few steps away from the tyre puncture shop where the twins had stopped. Two motorcycles drove up and the assailants fired with a 9mm fitted with a silencer. “It is a police picket and the police mobile No. 3 was on patrol that day,” confirmed the duty officer at Chakiwara police station, Shahid Khan. He says that they fired at the killers but were unable to chase them.

It has been a week and the police have not made any headway into the case. “The investigation is underway,” said investigation officer Inspector Islam Gul. In the meantime, the family has gone underground and Haider has been kept at an undisclosed medical facility. No police protection has been offered to the family.

The twins’ father Dr Abdul Ghafoor Qadri, who has served at the Lyari General Hospital for 20 years, was contacted by top police officials in Lyari on Tuesday. But this is cold comfort because the threat is still very real and no arrests have been made.

Jamal’s mother Aisha, swollen-faced from crying, has spent the last week slumped back against a sofa in a semiconscious state as her husband rushes around trying to make arrangements for the funeral and the family’s protection. “Allah will give me justice in 40 days,” she cries. She usually accompanied the boys to their exams but didn’t that day. “I told her so many times not to sit outside for three hours when they were inside doing the exam,” Dr Qadri says of his wife. “But she wouldn’t listen.”

The twins were sitting their BCom supplementary exams that were scheduled to run till January 11. Their mother clutches Jamal’s bookbag and pulls out his blood-splattered accounts register. She had just bought him an army water canteen. She treated the boys as if they were her little gems even though they were 23 years old; she bought them knitted caps, pencils, sunglasses. A ragged clutch of children from the neighbourhood, who Haider and Jamal used to tutor, look on wide-eyed as she pulls each blood-caked item out. Taking her cue, they pull out and hold up a cardboard butterfly made with paper clips, glitter and a paper tube that Jamal had fashioned for them as a present on New Year’s Eve.

For whatever it is worth, friends, relatives and members of the nationalist Awami Jamhoori Party held a token hunger strike outside the Karachi Press Club on Tuesday for five hours. The same effort was made in Larkana, Sukkur, Mirpurkhas and Hyderabad.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 9^th, 2013.