NAB officer’s death: Police seek ‘second opinion’ from forensic experts abroad

Says PFSA is overstepping mandate and unnecessarily delaying its report.

ISLAMABAD:

Local police investigating the mysterious death of National Accountability Bureau officer Kamran Faisal have written to the interior ministry requesting a forensic test of the deceased’s body be conducted abroad.

Interestingly, the move comes just a day after Punjab Forensic Science Agency (PFSA) experts visited Faisal’s room – where he was found hanging from a ceiling on January 18.

When asked why the Secretariat police do not want to wait for the PFSA report, an investigating officer said the police’s request was made just “for a second opinion.”  However, a senior police officer said, “The PFSA acted like an independent investigation agency, which was not its job.”

Legally, the police cannot challenge a forensic report directly but the PFSA’s activities, which, he said, were beyond-their-mandate, and “an unnecessary” delay in the report, caused them to suspect the authenticity of the report.

“They (PFSA) were bound to give us the chemical examination report at least,” said the police officer.

PFSA officials had written a letter to the police asking for permission to exhume Faisal’s body for further samples for forensic tests.

A Secretariat police station officer said that legally police were bound to make every medical report part of the investigation report. They had, however, the authority to get as many opinions on ‘complicated’ parts of the investigations as they deemed fit, said the senior police officer.

The samples taken from Faisal’s body are preserved at the Poly Clinic hospital and are likely to be sent abroad, most probably Britain, for forensic examinations.

The police’s move was aimed at sending a message to the PFSA, warning them against tampering the report or delaying the investigations, said an official from the Poly Clinic Hospital.

Faisal was one of the investigation officers probing the rental power projects (RPPs) case, which involves Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf. He was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his hostel room last month.

A five-member board of doctors in Poly Clinic ruled his death a ‘suicide’ based on an interim post mortem report. Later, hospital officials also revealed that Faisal was a psychiatric patient and he had been a regular visitor of the hospital’s psychiatry department since 1999.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2013.