Guilty as charged?: Court remands filmmaker to police custody

Police send the pistol used in the killing to the forensic division.

KARACHI: A district and sessions court remanded the physical custody of the award-winning filmmaker, Mansoor Mujahid, and his female friend to the Clifton police on Sunday till June 28.

Mujahid and his co-accused friend, A*, appeared before a judicial magistrate in district south, Hatim Solangi, who was hearing the case as a link judge.

The body of the 33-year-old victim, Faisal Nabi, was found outside the Sun Rise Apartments in Clifton Block 2 early Saturday morning. The police officials said that they found the body on the information provided by the already arrested Mujahid and his female friend A*.

Mujahid and his female friend A* were accused of killing and disposing the body of Faisal Nabi after killing him at Mujahid’s flat in Zamzama on the night between June 19 and June 20. In order to strengthen the case, investigators have sent the unlicensed pistol and other evidences collected from the crime scene to the laboratory for the examination.

“The accused have already confessed to the crime but we still have to make a strong case,” said the investigation officer, Chaudhry Saleem, while talking to The Express Tribune. “We have sent the unlicensed pistol used in the killing to the forensic division of the Sindh police for ballistic matching and we have also collected the evidences, including cloth pieces from the crime scene, and sent them to the laboratory for further examination.”

Investigators said that the sections of dumping a body and burning a body to hide its identification will be added to the FIR after the police have the medical report. “They told us that they had taken MDMA (ecstasy) pills and did not know what exactly happened at the time of the incident - the question remains, however, that if they were not conscious, how and why did they try to burn the body, dump it and then damage the crime scene,” said the officer. “On the one hand, they confessed to the crime but on the other hand, they tried to change the nature of the incident by declaring it an accident.”

Published in The Express Tribune, June 24^th, 2013.