Garden Town police have not registered a robbery complain of two students of the Punjab University two weeks after the incident.
The girls, students of MPhil, requesting anonymity, told The Express Tribune that on July 16 they had gone for Eid shopping at Gulberg’s Mini Market.
One of them said she was driving said she saw two motorcyclists performing stunts in front of the car.
She said when they reached the Kalma Chowk signal, the motorcyclists disappeared.
She said when they stopped at the traffic signal near Barkat Market, one of the motorcyclists approached their car on foot and pointed a pistol at them.
She said he told her he would shoot her if she did not give him her purse. She said she handed over her purse to him and he ran to a waiting car on the other side of the rode, got in and drove away.
She said the purse contained Rs40,000 cash and Samsung Galaxy S4 mobile phone worth Rs 55,000.
The girl said she tried to call the police on their helpline to report bout the robbery but no one responded.
She said they went to Garden Town police station at 6pm and gave an application for registration of FIR to a moharrar (clerk).
She said the moharrar asked them to amend the application and wait for the station house officer who did not reach the police station by 8pm.
She said a police official took them to crime scene and they were joined by SHO Mumtaz Hussain Kakar who noted down their story in his duty register and asked them visit the police station the next day.
She said when they went to the police station to get a copy of the FIR, the SHO was not available and moharrars told them that he would deal with their case as he knew it better.
She said they visited the police station six times but to no avail. Moharrar Zahid Hussain told The Express Tribune that he did not have information about their application. He said he also did not have information on whether any action had been taken on their application.
When contacted, the Kakar station house officer said if a complaint had been submitted for registration of the FIR, he would have known about it.
He said the complainants must not have filed the application therefore the FIR was not registered.
He said the police had been busy before Eid in the inquiry into the Model killings which might have caused them some inconvenience.
However, he said if they submitted their application, he was duty-bound to order registration of the FIR.
Advocate Tipu Salman Makhdoom, a legal expert, told The Express Tribune that the police often hesitated from taking action in such cases and were used to ignoring such robbery complaints. He was of the view that the police officials often did not register FIRs in such cases and if they had to, they would alter the story to ignore charges of robbery against the suspects.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 2nd, 2014.
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