By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: A judicial commission investigating the death of the Karachi businessman Mir Raza Ali suspended a tense hearing on Tuesday and ordered Sindh’s home minister to appear before it, after the province’s most senior law officer tried to stop the family’s lawyer from questioning a witness.
Justice Omar Sial, the Sindh High Court judge leading the one-man commission, accused Advocate General Jawad Dero of interference after Dero objected, twice, to counsel for Ali’s family putting questions to Karachi’s police surgeon, Dr Summaiya Syed, who was giving evidence about the handling of the case.
The clash came as Dr Syed was describing what senior police officers had done during Ali’s post-mortem examination — evidence at the heart of a case that has already forced one exhumation and has left the family accusing police of trying to cover up how their son died.
Ali, a 25-year-old graduate of the Institute of Business Administration, was found dead in Karachi’s Gulistan-e-Jauhar area on 29 July, a day after he left his family home in PECHS and disappeared. His father has never accepted the initial suggestion that his son took his own life, insisting from the outset that he was murdered.
In a written order issued after the hearing, Justice Sial did not disguise his irritation. “It is regrettable that the commission’s proceedings have been interrupted by Sindh Advocate General Jawad Dero,” he wrote. “He has objected to the family’s counsel asking any questions on behalf of the deceased’s family.”
He went further, noting pointedly that the objection came only when the police surgeon began describing the conduct of senior officers. “The highest law officer of the Sindh government making such a submission surprised me,” the order stated. “It is more meaningful that the disturbance comes at a time when the police surgeon was explaining the role of senior police officers during the post-mortem examination.”
‘Are you hiding something?’
According to accounts of the hearing, the confrontation began after Jibran Nasir, the lawyer representing Ali’s family, told the commission that samples taken from the businessman’s body had been sent for laboratory testing only after a delay. The commission asked Dr Syed whether such samples had a limited shelf life, and whether a delay of that kind could compromise the results.
Dr Syed told the panel that delays did not usually make a difference, though she could not rule out the possibility that some chemical trace had degraded before testing took place. She added that delays of this kind were unusual in a case of this profile.
It was at this point that Dero intervened, arguing that questions ought to be put by the commission itself rather than by Nasir on the family’s behalf. The commission pushed back sharply, asking why the provincial government would object to questions being asked for the benefit of a grieving family. “Are you hiding something?” the panel is reported to have asked.
Justice Sial made clear in his order that the question of relevance was his to decide, not the advocate general’s. “It is the commission’s discretion to determine whether a query is relevant to the proceedings or not,” he wrote, adding that the commission’s terms of reference required it to establish “the true facts and circumstances of the case”.
He did not stop there. “In my opinion, a deliberate attempt has been made by the Sindh advocate general to restrain the commission from addressing the family’s queries in a transparent manner,” the order said.
The hearing was suspended shortly afterwards, with the commission directing that a notice be issued to Sindh’s home minister, Ziaul Hassan Lanjar, ordering him to appear on 10 September and explain, in the judge’s words, “whether the family is barred from asking questions to satisfy themselves that justice is being done”.
A minister’s own words turned against him
The order’s tone reflected more than simple procedural frustration. Justice Sial noted that the commission’s own creation had followed public assurances from senior figures in the Sindh government — assurances that, in his view, sat awkwardly alongside Tuesday’s events.
He pointed to reporting from Dawn on 9 August in which Faryal Talpur, a member of the Sindh Assembly credited with first proposing the commission to the provincial government, had called for “a transparent and impartial comprehensive investigation” and said the public “should be transparently informed of all facts surrounding the case”. Talpur was further quoted as saying that delivering justice to the family and preserving public confidence in the justice system was a fundamental responsibility of the government and its institutions.
Justice Sial recorded that both Lanjar and the Sindh chief minister, Murad Ali Shah, had echoed those sentiments at the time. Tuesday’s stand-off, coming from the government’s own advocate general, appeared to the judge to sit uneasily with those earlier commitments.
Tuesday’s session had opened with Ali’s father and sister appearing before the commission, alongside Dr Syed. It followed a hearing a day earlier at which the commission had questioned several police officers over their handling of the investigation and issued a separate notice to DIG Amir Farooqi, the head of the investigation team, over the alleged withholding of case records.
How the case unravelled
The case has moved through a succession of controversies since Mr Ali’s body was discovered in bushes near Shahi Qila Ground, opposite the University of Karachi, the day after he vanished.
Within days, Dr Syed had told a private news channel that the findings of the original post-mortem raised troubling questions, some of which did not appear to match photographs of the body. That intervention set in motion a chain of events that would consume the following month.
On 6 August, a Karachi court granted an application from Ali’s father to have his son’s body exhumed, ordering the formation of a medico-legal board and a second post-mortem examination. The Sindh health department duly appointed an eight-member board, with Dr Syed as convener — only for the board to be reconstituted in the early hours of the following morning by order of the department’s director general. Dr Syed remained convener of the new, smaller five-member board, but its other members had all changed.
The family rejected the reconstituted board outright, and the exhumation, originally planned for that Friday, was postponed. Mr Nasir accused the authorities at the time of trying to bury the truth. Under pressure, the Sindh government restored the original board, and Mr Ali’s body was finally exhumed on 8 August.
The following day brought further upheaval: the Sindh inspector general’s office reconstituted the investigating team, and Karachi’s additional inspector general, Azad Khan, transferred the case from Ferozabad police station — where it had been registered as a kidnapping — to Zaman Town police station, with a murder charge now added to the police report.
That same day, the provincial government floated the idea of a judicial commission, only to shelve it within 24 hours after the family said they had made no such request and were satisfied with the newly appointed investigation team.
Eleven days later, on 19 August, Ali’s parents, Mir Hussain and Mariam Hussain, wrote directly to the chief minister asking him to personally supervise the murder investigation. They also called for a departmental inquiry into the original investigating team and the immediate suspension of the officers involved. The government acknowledged the letter and, on 23 August, announced it would after all form a judicial commission — this time to examine both whether the investigation had been impartial and the circumstances of Ali’s death.
The family’s lawyers objected almost immediately, taking the matter to the Sindh High Court on 24 August in a petition that argued for an independent, multi-agency joint investigation team “comprising officers who have had no previous involvement in the case” instead of a commission. The High Court dismissed that petition on 2 September, ruling that the choice of investigative body was the “prerogative of the government”.
By then, the results of the second post-mortem had already reframed the entire case. The final report concluded that Mr Ali had died from a single gunshot wound to the back, with the bullet entering through the posterior thorax and exiting through the front of the chest. “Death occurred due to cardiac rupture consequent to perforating firearm injury of the chest,” the report stated, adding in terms that left little room for alternative interpretation: “The findings are inconsistent with suicide as the manner of death.”
Sindh Home Minister Ziaul Hassan Lanjar is now due to appear before the commission on 10 September.
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