Salmaan Taseer's assassination: FIR registered

Taseer's son files FIR, states father assass­inated on motiva­tion and suppor­t of politi­cal, religi­ous partie­s.

ISLAMABAD: A first-information report (FIR) of the murder of Governor Salmaan Tasser was registered at the Kohsar police station on Wednesday.

The FIR has been lodged under clause 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code and clause seven of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

The late governor's son, Shehryar Taseer, has stated in the FIR that his father was assassinated on the motivation and support of some political and religious parties.

He has also revealed that his father constantly received death threats before being killed in the capital.

Investigations into the murder continued as the funeral funeral prayers were held today. A joint investigation team visited the the late governor’s assasination site to collect more evidence. Heavy police contigents were deployed at the spot to preserve the evidence.

The autopsy report was completed and will be sent to the Islamabad Superintendent of Police (SSP). The report said that the bullet to Taseer's neck was the one that proved fatal.

In Kohsar market, nine people were taken into custody for questioning.

The investigation team will conduct a background check of the assassin and has decided to contact the elite training center in Lahore to extract more evidence.

Updated from print edition (below)

Learning from mistakes: Police extra vigilant about forensic evidence

With the aftermath of former premier Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on their mind, police investigators appeared to be putting in every effort to properly preserve forensic evidence from the murder site of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer.

The police cordoned off the site immediately and continued investigations for hours after Taseer was killed. Vigilant commanders from Rangers and police stood on guard as investigators collected evidence from the crime scene.

The careful exercise seemed to be an attempt by the police to avoid charges that their counterparts, deployed at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi at the time of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, had to face.

The site of Bhutto’s assassination was immediately hosed down after the gun-and-suicide attack outside the public park in Rawalpindi in 2007. Senior police officials are still facing charges in courts for ordering to hose down the murder scene.

“We are extra careful to make sure that every piece of evidence is preserved … we don’t want to leave any loopholes this time,” explained a police official.

At the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims), several senior officials of the city’s police and administration remained on their toes until Taseer’s autopsy was completed. In Bhutto’s case, the police did not proceed with the postmortem because the family did not agree to it, a controversy that remains unresolved.

“We will make sure that the autopsy is done even if the family doesn’t want it,” a police official said as some of his officers pushed back several leaders from the Pakistan Peoples Party who were trying to storm into the Pims mortuary.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2011.