Prosecutor’s murder: Post-mortem to determine culpability

Police found corpse of suspected attacker during a raid on Tuesday.

ISLAMABAD:

Doctors at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims) on Thursday performed the post-mortem of an alleged terrorist, suspected of murdering a Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) prosecutor.

The police had found the corpse of Harris Khan on Tuesday buried in the yard of a house where they had seized an explosives-laden car on August 31.

The authorities were alerted to the presence of the body after the man arrested in connection with the explosives-laden car, Hammad Adil, confessed to two murders, including that of FIA prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali in Islamabad on May 3.

Ali was the main public prosecutor in the Benazir Bhutto murder case, among other high profile cases.

According to the police, Adil revealed that he and three accomplices planned and carried out the assassination near Sector G-9 as the prosecutor was going to work. Shots fired by Ali’s guard during the incident had injured one assassin, Omar Abdullah, who was later arrested by the police from a hospital in the capital. The police had initially believed that the assassination was the work of only one person.

But Adil told the police that Khan, the other assassin, was also injured and later succumbed to injuries. He was buried in Adil’s house in Phulgaran.

The Islamabad Police on Tuesday dug up the body from Adil’s house and sent it to Pims, where a four-member team of doctors performed the post-mortem on Thursday.

Authorities kept mum about details of the post-mortem but Dr Ayesha Majeed, who was part of the team, told The Express Tribune that the body was badly decomposed.

The doctor said the police had only asked them to perform an “external post-mortem” — done to look for visible injuries — and collect DNA samples, which they did. The samples have been sent to a laboratory for tests. The police are expected to compare Khan’s DNA with blood samples collected at the crime scene.

The final report of the post-mortem is expected on Friday.

During the interrogation, the police claimed Adil had also confessed to the murder of former federal minister Shahbaz Bhatti. In both murders, the police said Adil mentioned the involvement of Tanveer, a militant who is believed to have ties with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Tanveer is on the run, according to the police.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 20^th, 2013.