LAHORE: A suspect was wounded by fire from his own accomplices during an alleged police encounter in the Kahna area and is receiving treatment in hospital, police said.
According to police, the injured suspect has been identified as Usman, who was shifted to the General Hospital for medical treatment.
Police said two of the suspect’s accomplices succeeded in fleeing the scene, and that raids are being conducted for their arrest.
The specific assertion here — that the injured man was struck by fire from his own side rather than by police weapons — is a material one, and it is the police account.
If established, it alters the legal position substantially. Injury inflicted by a co-accused during the commission of an offence does not engage the questions of proportionality and necessity that arise when a police weapon causes the injury. It also shifts the evidentiary picture: the accomplices who fired may face additional charges.
Establishing it, however, is a forensic exercise rather than a narrative one. Ballistic examination can determine which weapon discharged the round recovered from a wound; the trajectory and entry angle can be reconstructed by a medico-legal officer; and the position of expended casings at the scene can be mapped. Whether that work is done, and whether its results are placed before the court, is what will determine the standing of the claim.
Where a person is injured in a police action, a medico-legal certificate is prepared at the treating hospital and forms part of the case record. The injured man’s own statement, once he is fit to give it, is recorded. Police are required to register a case setting out the circumstances.
The Lahore Times has requested from the district police the following, none of which was contained in the initial statement: What offence the raid related to; whether the injured man and the two absconders are nominated in registered cases; what weapons were recovered; whether any police personnel sustained injury; and the outcome of the medico-legal examination.
Until those particulars are available, the account above is reported as the police version, in the terms in which police have provided it. The word alleged is retained deliberately throughout. The injured man is entitled to the presumption of innocence and has not been convicted of any offence.
Kahna, on Lahore’s southern periphery along the Ferozepur Road corridor, sits at the transition between the city’s built-up area and the surrounding rural belt of Kasur district. Peripheral divisions of this kind present a recurring policing difficulty: suspects can move rapidly across a jurisdictional boundary that police pursuit and paperwork cross far more slowly.
Punjab Police have expanded joint operational arrangements between adjoining districts in recent years partly to address this. The effectiveness of those arrangements is, in practical terms, tested by cases exactly like this one.
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