KARACHI: Pakistan’s top judge on Thursday took suo motu notice of the shooting of an unarmed taxi driver by Rangers paramilitary soldiers in Karachi.
A three-member bench of the Supreme Court will hear the case on Friday, DawnNews reported. Meanwhile, a local court in Karachi sent a Rangers man accused in the shooting on physical remand until July 22.
The taxi driver, identified as Murid Abbas, was shot dead in Karachi's Gulistan-i-Jauhar locality on Tuesday when he allegedly failed to stop his vehicle upon being signaled to do so by Rangers personnel.
Rangers troops patrol Karachi and its surroundings to combat routine ethnic, political and extremist violence in the city. Human rights activists complain that the Rangers force, established for combat and border duty, is neither equipped nor trained for civilian areas.
Hearing the case on Thursday, a court in Karachi ordered physical remand for Lance Naik Ghulam Rasool, the Rangers man who fired five shots at Abbas and is now facing murder charges.
Rasool was subsequently handed over to the police.
Police has moreover claimed that three other Rangers men nominated in the case had managed to escape and were on the run.
Tuesday’s was the second such incident in recent weeks as last month another unarmed civilian was killed by Rangers in Shah Faisal Colony for the same reason.
The paramilitary force had to face extreme public backlash in 2011 when local TV channels aired footage of Rangers personnel shooting dead Sarfaraz Shah, an unarmed civilian, at point blank range in a public park in Karachi.
A local court subsequently found one paramilitary soldier guilty of murder and sentenced him to death and handed life terms to five other soldiers and a civilian for their involvement in Shah's killing.
The case had marked the first time that a civilian court in Pakistan had sentenced to death a serving member of the paramilitary force.