LAHORE: A police official was wounded during a firing incident in the Asif Colony area of Bagbanpura.
According to police, a constable posted to the Special Protection Unit, Umar, was caught in firing during a brawl that took place in Asif Colony. The bullet struck the official in the neck and the back, after which he was immediately moved to Mayo Hospital.
Police reached the scene as soon as the incident was reported, collected evidence from the site and began legal proceedings.
Police say the incident is being investigated from various angles, and efforts are being made to arrest the suspect involved in the firing.
According to police officials, the suspect will be arrested shortly in the light of the evidence and the investigation.
The Special Protection Unit is a specialised wing of the Punjab Police raised to provide security to foreign nationals, particularly Chinese personnel working on China–Pakistan Economic Corridor and other projects, as well as to designated installations and delegations. Its personnel are trained and deployed differently from station-level police and are ordinarily assigned to protective duty rather than to general policing of a locality.
That makes the circumstances described here — an SPU constable caught in crossfire during a neighbourhood brawl — a matter for the investigation to establish rather than assume. Whether the official was on duty, off duty, or present in a private capacity is not stated in the initial police account, and it materially affects both the investigative framing and any departmental follow-up.
The underlying phenomenon here is broader than one incident. Private disputes in Lahore’s older, densely populated localities escalate to gunfire with a frequency that would be regarded as extraordinary in comparable cities elsewhere, and the injuries that result are frequently to people who were not party to the quarrel.
Two structural factors sustain it. The first is the availability of weapons. Punjab has issued very large numbers of arms licences over the decades, alongside an unquantified stock of unlicensed weapons, and possession is normalised in a way that converts an argument into a shooting.
The second is aerial and celebratory firing, which contributes a steady stream of casualties to Lahore’s hospitals and has been the subject of repeated crackdowns and repeated failures of enforcement. Punjab has periodically banned display of weapons and celebratory firing under Section 144, and the ban is enforced in intense bursts around major festivals and then not enforced at all.
The evidentiary consequence is worth noting too. In a crowded locality, a shooting during a brawl typically produces multiple witnesses and no cooperative ones, because witnesses live alongside the parties. That is why the recovery of physical evidence at the scene — casings, trajectory, CCTV from surrounding premises — determines whether such cases reach conviction.
Bagbanpura falls within Lahore’s Safe City camera coverage. Whether footage from the area is being examined is a question the investigating officer should be able to answer, and this newspaper will ask it.
-Reported by Waqas Ahmed
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