LAHORE: First, they shot at the car’s tyres. As one tyre burst, the small Suzuki Alto swerved sharply to the right before spinning fast and finally coming to a halt.
Within minutes, armed gunmen in balaclavas emerged from two police vehicles. They pointed their guns at the driver and pulled the trigger for a second time.
When the firing stopped, one of the uniformed men dialed a number on his mobile and spoke briefly to someone on the other line even as Khalil, who was sitting in the passenger seat of the Alto, pleaded for mercy. "Let my family live. Take anything you want,” he told the men, holding on tightly to his four-year-old daughter. But as soon as the call ended, there was another round of gunfire.
Khalil, his wife, and their 13-year-old daughter died immediately, while their three surviving children -- Umair, 10, Hadia, 7, and Muniba, 4 -- were yanked out of the car before it was sprayed with bullets for the fourth and final time.
A stranger spotted the screaming and bleeding children and drove them to a petrol station in the nearby city of Sahiwal, in Punjab. A bullet had grazed Umair’s leg and his four-year-old sister’s hand.
An hour later, Khalil’s brother, Muhammad Jalil, received a phone call from Rescue 1122 -- an ambulance service station. They told him to pick up three minor children and four dead bodies from a civil hospital in Sahiwal.
“Our neighbors saw the morning news and quickly called us,” Jalil said, adding that "if they hadn’t told us, we would have continued to search for my brother and his family."
This was on the morning of January 19 and the men who were behind the killings -- which took place on a busy thoroughfare outside of Lahore -- turned out to be counter-terrorism officials.
In a written statement to a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) who were tasked with probing the incident, Umair said that the men had abandoned him and his two sisters in the middle of the road, before speeding away.
The three children survived only because their parents had used their own bodies to shield them from the gunfire.
In a statement released to the press on the same day, Punjab’s Counter Terrorism Department (CTD), a specialized unit of the police, said that it was involved in an “intelligence-based operation” that had resulted in a shootout with “terrorists.”
The police report, a copy of which is available with Arab News, states that terrorists were travelling from Lahore to Sahiwal using a family as their cover. The family which was inside the car, it added, was shot at by terrorists travelling on a motorcycle, who fled the scene soon after.
However, a video, recorded by a passerby on his cell phone, shows that it was the men in uniform who had been firing at the time. It doesn't show any other motorcycle or an exchange of fire taking place.
In the course of the next few days, the the story's narrative had changed with officials now saying that Zeeshan, the driver, was a terrorist associated with Daesh.
Punjab’s Law Minister Muhammad Basharat Raja, who had shared the details, added that he “was carrying explosives, hand grenades and weapons.” Except, another video, captured by an eyewitness, rebuffed the provincial minister's claims.
It shows CTD officers pulling out suitcases -- which Khalil’s family was traveling with -- instead of explosives from the car’s trunk. Yet, the law minister insisted that the operation was “100 percent correct." As for Khalil and his family, they were simply “collateral damage.” The car had tinted windows and the officers could not see inside, Raja said.
However, if 10-year-old Umair is to be believed, the officers had a clear view of the car and its occupants in between firings.
Now, the law minister said his statement about the operation being “100 percent correct” was misunderstood. Speaking to Arab News, he explained: “The final decision will be made after the JIT report comes. What I said was that it was an intelligence-based operation. The intelligence reports were that there were terrorists in the car. But, it is unfortunate, we have found leads on only one person in the car. The others have no link to terrorists, as per the evidence so far.”
Other loopholes have since surfaced in the case as well. The first handwritten police report mentions 16 CTD men who conducted the operation, while only six been arrested till date.
When Khalil’s family asked for an attested copy of the police’s First Information Report (FIR) -- to file a petition in the court -- government officials gave them three separate ones, each different from the other and with a different vehicle registration number of the car which the family was traveling in.
“The entire incident could be a case of mistaken identity,” Ehtesham Amir-ud-din, the family’s lawyer told Arab News. “In the first FIR, the car they were chasing had the number LER-6663. But they fired at a car with the number plate LEA-6683.” Officials told him it was merely a typing error.
When conflicting details of the Sahiwal incident emerged, it triggered a public outcry, with several seeing its as a staged extrajudicial killing which the police in Pakistan are sometimes accused of.
For now, the newly-elected government has formed a JIT for a thorough probe. However, Jalil said that it is an exercise in futility as it comprises senior officials from the police and intelligence agencies.
“The same force, whose officers are accused of killing our brother, is heading the inquiry. How is that fair?” Jalil said. Instead, Khalil’s family wants the investigation to be headed by members of the judiciary.
The official version today is that Khalil and his family are innocent, with Zeeshan being identified was a terrorist.
Last month, in a briefing to the Senate, Punjab’s additional chief home secretary told lawmakers that they have recovered an audio recording and a selfie which links 28-year-old Zeeshan to Daesh.
Two calls traced to his phone number were made from Afghanistan, where Daesh militants have a stronghold, the secretary added.
However, a senator who was part of the address questioned the information and asked how the calls could have been received in the first place. He cited a news report which had quoted Pakistan’s telecommunication body as saying that it would no longer be possible to make calls directly from Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Zeeshan’s family rubbishes the claims. They say he made a living by selling computers. “No one has come to see us. No one has called us to the JIT,” Zeeshan’s mother said from her humble two-bedroom home. “It is like they don’t even want to hear from us."
Meanwhile, Punjab's chief minister has ordered for the JIT to submit its final report on February 19. “We have made a commitment,” Raja told Arab News, adding that “the victims will be given complete justice, no matter what needs to be done.”
On February 14, a few days before the final report was expected, the head of the JIT, Additional Inspector General (AIG) Syed Ijaz Hussain Shah, told the Lahore High Court that they had not yet interviewed all the eyewitnesses in the case. “It is sad,” the chief justice of the court said during the hearing, “You are a responsible officer. You should have called all the witnesses by now. We had even provided their phone numbers to you.”
For Khalil's three children, justice delayed continues to be justice denied. It has been three weeks since four-year old Muniba saw her parents killed in cold blood. "She still asks for her mother at night. She doesn’t cry but she doesn’t sleep either,” Muhammad Bashir, Khalil’s aging father said, fighting back the tears streaming down his face.
“My son was innocent. His children are innocent,” he said.
