Silenced!

Masked gunmen shot dead police surgeon Dr Syed Baqir Shah, who had contradicted police and Frontier Corps’ reports of the Kharotabad incident in Quetta on Thursday. Superintendent of Police Fareedullah Bareach told reporters that the identity of the killers was yet unknown. However, he said he would be able to comment in this regard after an investigation. Shah was going home from hospital when the gunmen ambushed his car and shot him in the head five times, killing him on the spot, Bareach said. His personal staff officer, Abdul Hameed Mengal was accompanying him when the armed men opened fire at them on Sabzal Road.
Mengal, the only witness who was sitting in the backseat, told police that when Shah slowed down his car near his house, one of the two gunmen, who were waiting there, rushed towards the car and started firing at them. He said both the assailants had their faces covering and fled soon after. The police surgeon received fame after the Kharotabad incident when he contradicted police and Frontier Corps’ version that five foreigners, four Russians and one Tajik, were killed in hand-grenade explosions which they were carrying. Dr Shah, who performed the autopsy on the victims, declared in his report that no sign of splinters was found on their bodies and the cause of the death of the foreigners, including three women, one of them seven months pregnant, were bullet wounds.
He had also told an enquiry tribunal investigating the incident that he had been receiving life threats from some “quarters” who were pressurizing him to change his postmortem report.
Dr Shah is survived by his wife and two sons, aged eight and 14.