By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: The Sindh government has formed a joint investigation team, led by a senior police officer and including representatives of Pakistan’s main intelligence agencies, to investigate the murder of Karachi entrepreneur Mir Raza Ali, whose death police first declared a suicide.
The decision follows a judicial commission’s finding that the police inquiry was an “epic failure” and that the 25-year-old, who ran the dessert business Wafflix, was killed.
According to an official letter, Deputy Inspector General Irfan Ali Baloch will lead the team. It will include officials from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Intelligence Bureau, the Sindh Rangers and the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA).
Ali, a graduate of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), left his home in the PECHS neighbourhood of Karachi in the early hours of 28 July. His family reported him missing the same day. His body was found the following morning in bushes in the jurisdiction of Gulistan-e-Johar police station, with gunshot wounds.
Police built their case around suicide, relying on a first post-mortem examination that recorded a bullet entry wound in the chest, and pointing to business losses and money he had borrowed. Police surgeon Dr Summaiya Syed disputed those findings. A second post-mortem, carried out after exhumation, called the first report “inconsistent” with suicide. The Exhumation Board unanimously concluded that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the back.
The single-member commission, headed by Sindh High Court judge Justice Omar Sial, handed its sealed report to the provincial government on 15 October after examining 49 witnesses over 15 hearings. The Sindh cabinet, chaired by Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, then decided to make it public.
“This case demonstrates an epic failure by the police in their investigation,” the report said. It added that officers “breached all required procedures, both knowingly and unknowingly, necessary to withstand judicial scrutiny and a successful prosecution”. On the cause of death it was blunt: “It was a murder.”
The commission said the bullet’s trajectory, the unusual location of the wound for a self-inflicted injury, the absence of blood, acid burns and anaesthesia detected in the blood “all clearly excluded suicide”. It said police were wrong to publish their findings before a proper investigation, calling the move “premature” and short of professional standards. Even if it had been suicide, it said, officers should have established who drove a young man to that point, including whether coercion or blackmail was involved. “They made no such effort.”
The panel described the handling of the case as “like a rudderless ship”. It found “lack of leadership, seriousness, and supervision” among senior officers and an investigation that ranged “from negligent to criminally negligent”. It said dozens of police officers, some authorised and some not, collected evidence and questioned key people without documenting it, so that no one would accept responsibility for the lapses. It said it could not rule out an active cover-up in the early stages, though it acknowledged it had no investigative powers to establish one.
The commission also criticised the police for going “into a shell” under public criticism and for ignoring its recommendation to appoint a focal person to brief the family and the public. Speculation, it said, “further embarrassed the government and the police”.
It singled out several people. Adeel Afzal, the station house officer at Ferozabad police station, was found to have shown “criminal negligence”, and the commission recommended a comprehensive inquiry that could lead to his dismissal, with suspension in the interim. It also called for questioning to establish whether he had facilitated the destruction of key evidence. Sub-inspector Shabbir Leghari, the first investigating officer, was also found criminally negligent, and the commission called for disciplinary proceedings and his suspension. It found criminal negligence by Inspector Ghaus but recommended no action against him. It noted a lack of leadership and supervision by DIG Farukh Lanjar and Senior Superintendent of Police Samiullah Soomro.
Dr Osama Sheikh, the medico-legal officer who carried out the first autopsy, was accused of “extreme immaturity” and “childish behaviour”. The commission said his findings were later proved incorrect, and that he should not be given medico-legal duties without at least two years of rigorous training. It also said he was “possibly influenced” and that the angle should be “conclusively determined”.
The report was equally critical of Sindh’s health authorities. It described the overnight reconstitution of the medical board for the exhumation as “a highly irregular, inexplicable, legally flawed overreach” directed from the Sindh Health Secretariat, naming the secretary and the special secretary. It said the director general of Health Services, aware that he lacked the legal competence to form such a board, “looked the other way”. Of a meeting at the chief minister’s residence on 9 August, which attended by Dr Sheikh and the Karachi police chief, it said “no ulterior motive can be inferred”.
The commission reserved some of its sharpest language for evidence it found suspicious. It called a voice note given to police by Alishaz Mushtaq “one of the most suspicious parts of this case”, and said he and Assistant Superintendent of Police Nida Junaid “played a very important role in supporting the police narrative that the death was due to suicide”. The person Mushtaq named as his source did not corroborate what he had said.
WhatsApp messages Ali sent to Sarim Bin Tahir asking for Rs30m, which the commission said were full of “uncharacteristic grammatical errors and truncated spellings” and read as “acute panic”, suggested he was being blackmailed or threatened. CCTV footage showed Ali carrying a pistol on the night he died, yet friends told the commission he did not own or use one and probably would not know how to handle it. The weapon has not been found. His known financial difficulties, the commission added, were not of a kind that would lead someone to suicide.
The commission said the family’s request for a joint investigation team was the “most viable path” to limit reputational damage to the Sindh government. It said the police bore “responsibility for this profound trust deficit” and that even an accurate conclusion was unlikely to be accepted by the public. It said the case could now “only be resolved through a rigorous, intelligence-based investigation”, because a significant portion of the physical evidence had been compromised.
The provincial Home Department has since written to the Sindh Inspector General of Police, forwarding the commission’s observations and recommendations from a cabinet subcommittee on action against named officers. In a separate letter to the health secretary, it recommended that Dr Sheikh be removed from his post and made to undergo two years of training.
A one-member committee headed by Zulfiqar Ali Larik, additional inspector general of the Counter-Terrorism Department, will review the roles and overall performance of police officers named in the report, with Baloch assisting. Its inquiry will include a further examination of Inspector Ghaus’s role in the burning of the crime scene. It will report to the Sindh police chief.
Sindh has also asked the federal interior ministry to nominate a Federal Investigation Agency officer of Grade 20 or above to head a further committee, on which Mr Baloch and DIG Naeem Ahmed Shaikh are expected to sit. That reflects the commission’s recommendation of a high-level inquiry, preferably led by the FIA, into whether police involved in the first 10 days breached sections of the Pakistan Penal Code covering the destruction of evidence, disobeying the law with intent to cause injury, and framing an incorrect record to protect someone from punishment.
The commission also urged police reform, including a committee of “seasoned professionals” to overhaul first response, crime scene handling and the recording of investigations, a bigger investigation budget with monitoring of how it is spent, and better training for investigators and crime scene units. It proposed a three-month timeframe but left the decision to the government.
The chief minister has set up a three-member subcommittee to oversee implementation, made up of Home Minister Ziaul Hassan Lanjar, Local Government Minister Nasir Hussain Shah and Labour Minister Saeed Ghani. It will report to him and then to the cabinet. Senior Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon said on X that the government “remains committed to transparency, accountability and ensuring that due process of law is upheld”.
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