Lahore: A nine-year-old Australian girl of Pakistan origin was killed and her father and brother were critically injured when police personnel opened indiscriminate fire on their car suspecting them to be robbers in Punjab province of Pakistan, police said Sunday.
The incident took place in Chakwal district, about 300 km from Lahore June 10.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) said the incident has caused significant distress to the Australian-Pakistani community. We are are providing assistance to the victim family, it said.
According to police, Australian-Pakistani family — Adeel Ahmed, 39, his wife Dr Sidra Khan, daughter Hania, 9, and son Aafan, 10 — returned to Pakistan after performing Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia last week.
Last Wednesday night, Ahmad along with his three family members was going to his father-in-law’s house for dinner in a car when they were waylaid by two armed gunmen on a motorcycle, the police said in a statement.
He called the police emergency number and police communicated the incident to the Crime Control Department (CCD), a specialised force against criminals, the statement added.
The CCD personnel reached the spot and mistook the family in the car for robbers and opened indiscriminate fire, the police said.
As a result, the car was riddled with bullets and nine-year-old Hania died on the spot while Adeel and Aafan were critically injured and are being treated in hospital. Dr Sidra remained unhurt.
Police said a CCD official involved in the indiscriminate fire has been arrested on murder charges and a formal investigation is underway against other personnel.
The police said two suspects who tried to rob the family were arrested. Identified as Muhammad Abbas and Muhammad Fayyaz, they were shot dead in a police encounter while allegedly trying to flee, the police said.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader and former federal minister Moonis Elahi said this extremely tragic incident exposed the brutality of the CCD under Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz.
This cold-blooded killing of innocent people continues in Punjab. Since the CCD was given a free hand by Maryam Nawaz, more innocent citizens than criminals appear to be falling victim to its actions and this is a very alarming trend, Moonis said in a post on X.
Who will compensate this family for such an irreparable loss Are CCD personnel so unprofessional, inexperienced, and reckless that they cannot distinguish between an innocent family and armed robbers Or is the intelligence and informant system established by the CCD so ineffective that the real criminals manage to escape while a vehicle carrying an innocent family is sprayed with bullets Elahi questioned.
Maryam last year had formed the CCD, tasking it to bring down the crime rate in the province of 130 million people by adopting a ruthless strategy.
During the last one year, the CCD killed over 1,100 people (criminals) in encounters.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has called for an immediate judicial inquiry into the killing of over 1,100 people in staged encounters by the CCD. The CCD has adopted a deliberate policy of staged police encounters leading to extrajudicial killing, it claimed.
