Coordinated attacks on police: Officials keep mum on progress of investigation

Claim sketches of suspects have been prepared but refuse to confirm or deny arrests.

HYDERABAD:

Four days after the coordinated attacks on policemen in Hyderabad, in which four officials were killed, no major breakthroughs in the investigations have been disclosed by the police officials. 

“We are investigating two separate leads after the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [reportedly] accepted responsibility of the attacks,” said SSP Syed Irfan Bahadur. Earlier, the police was more focused on the ‘local context’.

Police officials are avoiding disclosing their progress in the case. SSP Bahadur even did not reveal if any of the suspects identified in the sketches of the assailants had been apprehended.

“We detained over two dozen suspects the night after the attack,” he told The Express Tribune but did not share their identities.

On the evening of November 26, four coordinated attacks were carried out against the policemen at separate locations. Four policemen were killed in the attack in Latifabad while a security guard was also mistakenly killed as a policeman in another attack. Two more police constables were critically injured in Liaquat Colony. A bullet intended for a policeman at Liberty Chowk hit and injured a 12-year-old boy.

The targeted operation in Karachi has been going on for three months. The Rangers and Karachi police have time and again claimed that the suspects fleeing from the city have taken refuge in other parts of Sindh besides other provinces in the country. According to SSP Bahadur, however, all the suspects arrested were either from Hyderabad or other parts of Sindh.

A police official, who is part of the investigation, told The Express Tribune that no “substantial” evidence showing involvement of a particular group has been collected so far.  In the aftermath of the attack, Hyderabad DIG Naeem Akram Bharokha constituted two teams of police officials for investigation. One of these teams, comprising Matiari SSP Amjad Shaikh and Dadu SSP Tariq Dharejo, is assisting in the technical part of the investigation while the team, headed by SSP Bahadur, is working on the operational and investigation aspects.

The police sources said that there were some eye-witnesses of the attacks but the department lacked funds to provide witness protection as stipulated in the Sindh Witness Protection Act, 2013. When asked, the SSP neither accepted nor denied presence of any witnesses. The FIRs registered at four police stations also do not carry the name of any witnesses.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2013.