Syed Hamid Raza, an assistant registrar at the Supreme Court, was killed in Islamabad. He was considered to be close to suspended CJ Iftikhar Mohd Chaudhry.
ISLAMABAD: In an ugly development, the additional registrar of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Syed Hammad Raza, who was considered to be close to the suspended chief justice of Pakistan, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in the wee hours of Monday after they broke into his Islamabad residence.
Hammad, who had been associated with Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry when the latter was serving as the chief justice of Balochistan High Court, was killed hours before the Supreme Court was to start hearing the constitutional petition of Justice Iftikhar. The Islamabad police are investigating whether it was a dacoity-cum-murder or a case of target killing because there are no signs of resistance on the dead body and it appears that Hammad had been shot in his point blank.
Police claimed it was a case of robbery-cum-murder while his brother said it was a targeted killing and not a robbery. “There is no evidence that it was a robbery. Islamabad police is twisting the story,” Raza’s brother Khalid Ali Shah told reporters.
A police officer said four armed men broke into the house of Raza in Islamabad and opened fire on him when he showed resistance. Police said the robbers first entered the ground portion of Raza’s house in sector G-10 locality and later went to the upper portion, where he was living. Raza was critically injured in the firing and was taken to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, where he died.
Meanwhile, a countrywide shutter down strike was observed in Pakistan on Monday on the call of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD) which has accused President General General Musharraf and his allied Mohajir Qaumi Movement of engineering the violence in Karachi that left 42 people dead, a majority of whom were Sindhis and Pashtuns belonging to the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Awami National Party.
While a complete strike was observed in Karachi and Lahore, a partial strike was observed in Quetta, Peshawar and Islamabad. The violent deaths in Karachi came amid growing discontent over Musharraf’s suspension of the country’s chief justice who has already challenged the March 9 presidential orders in the Supreme Court and leading a mass contact movement which has literally turned into an anti-Musharraf agitation.
The opposition parties also took out protest processions in Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar to condemn the highhanded tactics of MQM government in Sindh. No such activity was reported from Karachi where a complete strike was observed amid reports of some minor clashes.
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