By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: The Sindh government said Sunday it will ask the chief justice of the province’s high court to form a judicial commission to examine whether the investigation into the killing of 25-year-old businessman Mir Raza Ali has been conducted fairly, a decision that follows weeks of accusations from the victim’s family that police tried to bury the truth behind his death.
The move, announced in a statement from Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah’s office, comes days after Ali’s parents wrote directly to Shah asking him to take personal charge of overseeing the case. Ali’s parents, Mir Hussain and Mariam, said in their letter, filed through attorney Jibran Nasir, that investigators seemed intent on advancing what they called a false theory that their son had taken his own life.
The chief minister’s office said the family’s letter had been received “with compassion and the utmost seriousness,” and that after weighing their concerns, the government had decided the case warranted outside scrutiny.
“After carefully considering the concerns expressed by the family, the government of Sindh has decided to request the honourable chief justice of the Sindh High Court to establish a judicial commission to conduct an impartial and transparent inquiry,” the statement said.
The commission, according to the government’s announcement, will be tasked with determining whether the investigation has followed the law, whether any evidence or investigative leads have gone unexplored, and — more pointedly — whether any police officer, medico-legal official, or other government employee engaged in negligence, misconduct, evidence tampering, or an outright cover-up. The panel will also have the authority to recommend further forensic work and legal or departmental action against anyone found responsible.
To carry out that mandate, the government said, the commission will be granted the full powers of a civil court under the Sindh Tribunals of Inquiry Ordinance of 1969 — meaning it can compel witnesses to testify under oath and order the production of documents and records. All government departments and officials have been instructed to cooperate fully, with the Home Department providing administrative support. The commission has been given 30 days to report its findings, though that window can be extended if a thorough inquiry requires more time.
The chief minister’s office closed its statement by offering condolences to the Ali family.
A killing, then a fight over how he died
Ali, a graduate of the Institute of Business Administration, was reported missing on July 28. The next day, his body was found in bushes in Karachi’s Gulistan-i-Jauhar neighborhood, a gunshot wound visible on his remains. From the outset, his family insisted he had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Police, however, initially pursued the case as a likely suicide.
That theory collapsed after Ali’s body was exhumed and a second postmortem examination found multiple injuries and a gunshot wound to his back — findings investigators said were incompatible with suicide. A murder charge was then added to the criminal complaint.
The push for a second autopsy grew out of a dispute between Karachi’s police surgeon and the original investigating team over what the surgeon described as gaps in the first medico-legal report. A judicial magistrate authorized the exhumation on August 6, acting on a petition filed by Ali’s father, and ordered the police surgeon and the Sindh health secretary to assemble a medical board to oversee the procedure.
What followed was a bureaucratic tangle that further inflamed tensions with the family. The health department initially named an eight-member board led by Dr. Syed. Hours later, in the early morning of August 7, the board was dissolved and replaced by health department leadership with a five-member panel — still led by Dr. Syed, but with different members. Ali’s family rejected the new board outright, forcing a delay in the exhumation that had been planned for that Friday. Nasir, the family’s lawyer, accused authorities of maneuvering to obscure the facts of the case.
Under pressure, the government restored the original medical board, and Ali’s body was finally exhumed on August 8.
The following day brought two more developments: the Sindh police chief’s office reshuffled the team investigating Ali’s death, and Karachi’s additional inspector general, Azad Khan, moved the case from Ferozabad Police Station, where it had originally been registered, to Zaman Town Police Station. That same day, the provincial government first floated the idea of seeking a judicial commission — only to shelve the plan a day later after the family said it had not requested one and expressed confidence in the newly assembled investigative team.
A 22-page letter breaks the truce
Whatever confidence the family had did not last. On Wednesday, Ali’s parents sent Shah a lengthy, detailed letter — 22 pages in all — laying out their grievances with the investigation in granular detail. In it, they wrote that those responsible for their son’s death, along with anyone who helped conceal it, continued to wield enough political influence to keep the truth from surfacing despite intense public attention on the case.
The letter described the family as horrified by what they called rampant corruption, incompetence, and political interference within the Sindh police force. On their behalf, Nasir called for the immediate suspension of every officer who had served on the original investigating team.
The letter also took aim at the pace of the current inquiry. Even after police publicly ruled out suicide on Tuesday, following the second postmortem, the family’s letter questioned why investigators continued poring over old medical reports rather than devoting their energy to securing other forms of evidence that could identify who was responsible.
In all, the letter posed 24 unanswered questions the family said the investigation had failed to address — among them, questions about Ali’s communications in the period before his death, the precise circumstances surrounding the killing, and what happened to digital and forensic evidence the family believes has gone missing. The letter also faulted police for failing to account for the actions of Ali’s business partner in the days surrounding the murder.
“The police hierarchy has been reduced to a tool used to corrupt and later destroy the crime scene,” the letter alleged.
The family’s attorney argued that the conduct of the original investigating team may constitute criminal offenses under Pakistan’s penal code, citing specifically Section 201, which covers causing evidence to disappear or providing false information to protect an offender, and Section 218, which addresses public officials who falsify records to shield someone from prosecution.
Beyond the legal citations, the letter outlined 10 proposed charges against the officers involved, including deliberate mishandling of evidence, failure to record witness statements, manipulation of investigative records, improper handling of the deceased’s electronic devices, and what the letter described as an abuse of official position aimed at obstructing the investigation.
The family also proposed 13 specific areas of inquiry for a formal departmental investigation into the officers’ conduct. Those include why the original team embraced the suicide theory so quickly, why investigators allegedly ignored warnings raised by the Karachi police surgeon, why the reconstituted medical board faced resistance from within the health department, and how the custody and forensic examination of Ali’s smartwatch was handled. The letter also called for investigators to examine whether any senior police official or other person of influence pressured the original team to promote the suicide narrative or otherwise interfered with the case.
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