LAHORE: One man was killed in an alleged encounter with the Crime Control Department in the Badami Bagh area, according to police.
CCD Nawan Kot raided a dera in Badami Bagh to arrest suspects, officials said.
According to CCD officials, the suspects opened fire as soon as they saw the team. One suspect was subsequently killed in what officials described as an alleged exchange of cross-fire, while his other accomplices succeeded in fleeing.
The CCD said the deceased has been identified as Faisal, while a search continues for his accomplices, Tanveer and Imran.
The body of the deceased suspect, Faisal Ali, was shifted to the mortuary.
The Crime Control Department was constituted by the Punjab government as a specialised unit tasked with countering organised criminal networks, dacoity gangs and violent street crime, and was given a mandate spanning intelligence-led operations across the province.
Its creation followed sustained public and political pressure over street crime rates in Punjab’s major cities and over the entrenched dacoit gangs of the katcha riverine belt in the province’s south and west. The unit’s remit overlaps with, and in some functions replaces, arrangements previously handled by the Counter Terrorism Department and district investigation staff.
The Lahore Times reports the sequence above as the account provided by police. It has not been independently verified, and this newspaper attaches the qualifier alleged throughout, as the original police statement does.
The legal framework governing such deaths is settled. Every death in a police encounter requires the registration of a case and an inquiry under Section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a post-mortem examination, and a magisterial inquiry where circumstances warrant. Police officers claiming self-defence must establish that the force used was proportionate and necessary — the burden falls on the person invoking the right of private defence under Sections 96 to 106 of the Pakistan Penal Code.
Pakistan’s superior courts, the National Commission for Human Rights and domestic and international rights organisations have all, at various points, expressed concern about the frequency of deaths described as encounters and about the consistency of the accounts offered. Those concerns are a matter of public record and are noted here in the interest of balance, not as an assertion about this particular case.
Several questions remain open at the time of publication: whether a case has been registered in respect of the death; whether the deceased was wanted in specific registered cases and, if so, which; what weapons were recovered from the scene; and whether any police personnel were injured in the exchange.
The Lahore Times has sought this information from the district police and will publish it on receipt, along with any statement from the family of the deceased.
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