By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani police constable has been arrested and charged with murder after a nine-year-old Australian girl was shot dead when officers opened fire on her family’s vehicle during an armed robbery in Punjab province, mistaking the car for one being used by fleeing suspects.
Hania Ahmed, who had travelled with her family from Perth to Pakistan following the annual Hajj pilgrimage, died from her wounds after the shooting on the night of 10 June in Chakwal district. Her father, Adeel Ahmed, 39, and her ten-year-old brother, Aafan, sustained critical gunshot wounds and remained under medical treatment. Her mother, Sidra Khan, was unharmed.
The incident has provoked an outpouring of grief and anger in both Pakistan and Australia, where it was reported prominently by ABC, The Guardian and SBS. It has also intensified scrutiny of the Crime Control Department (CCD), a Punjab police unit established in April last year to combat organised crime, which human rights groups had already accused of carrying out systematic extrajudicial killings.
Constable Shujaat Mughal was suspended and taken into custody on the same day as the shooting. He has since been produced before a court and remanded to judicial custody. A First Information Report — the formal charge document under Pakistani law — was registered immediately on the complaint of the wounded father.
‘My wife took off her jewellery and handed it over’
According to the family’s account and the FIR, the Ahmeds had recently returned from Makkah after completing Hajj when they set out on the evening of 10 June for a family dinner at the home of Adeel Ahmed’s in-laws in Chakwal. The trouble began near the offices of the CCD itself, when two armed men stopped the vehicle and held the passengers at gunpoint, demanding their valuables.
“My wife and I complied,” Ahmed told officers, according to the FIR. “My wife took off her jewellery and handed it over.”
What happened next unfolded in seconds. A shot was fired — by whom remains part of the investigation — and the robbers, taking cover behind or near the vehicle, opened fire in response. Return fire then came from the front, and Ahmed, believing his family were caught in a crossfire, accelerated to escape.
“Cross-firing also commenced from the front side,” he said in his statement. The vehicle was struck by a hail of bullets from behind as it sped away. Both children and their father were hit. The family was rushed to a nearby hospital, where Hania was pronounced dead. The two suspected robbers — identified by police as Mohammad Abbas and Mohammad Faiyaz, both from Punjab province and said to have prior criminal records — were killed in the encounter.
‘No justification for a departure from our protocols’
Sohail Zafar Chatha, the Punjab CCD’s Additional Inspector General, acknowledged in unusually candid terms that the officer responsible had acted in serious breach of procedure.
“The conduct of the officer involved has represented a grave deviation from our established Standard Operating Procedures and the legal standards governing the use of force,” he said.
Presenting the findings of an internal inquiry, Chatha said CCD personnel had responded to a robbery in progress and that the robbers had fired first on the attending officer. The officer then made a catastrophic misjudgement. “In the ensuing chaos, the officer involved mistakenly assessed that the suspects were attempting to flee in the victims’ vehicle and discharged his weapon,” Chatha said, describing what amounted to a public concession of gross negligence.
Forensic evidence — including the officer’s weapon and spent cartridges — has been secured and sent for analysis, the CCD confirmed. “While our personnel operate in high-risk environments, there is no justification for a departure from our protocols,” Chatha said. “We are conducting a thorough, impartial investigation to ensure that justice is served.”
‘It was police bullets that hit my family’
The family’s grandfather, Mazhar Hussain said the family had no interest in the fate of the robbers. His concern was singular and specific.
“We are now being told that the robbers were killed in an encounter. We don’t know about that, but what we know for certain is that it was police bullets that hit my family,” he said. The family had been on their way home after dinner with relatives when the shooting happened, he said. “We demand justice and exemplary action against the police officers involved.”
Police initially registered the case as murder and armed robbery against unidentified suspects before amending the charges and arresting Mughal following a preliminary investigation. A local police official, Sajjad Hussain, confirmed that the CCD personnel had mistaken the family’s vehicle for that of the suspected criminals.
A department under scrutiny
The killing has drawn renewed attention to the CCD and its record since it was established fourteen months ago. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said it had documented at least 670 encounters resulting in 924 deaths between April 2025 — when the CCD was formed — and December 2025, a rate of killing that rights groups have described as evidence of a culture of extrajudicial violence. The CCD has denied those allegations.
The case is now subject to both criminal proceedings against Constable Mughal and a broader departmental inquiry. For the family of Hania Ahmed — a nine-year-old from Perth who travelled with her parents to perform one of Islam’s holiest obligations and never made it home — neither process can undo what happened on a dark roadside in Chakwal on a June evening.
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