SWAT: A police constable, who was arrested for using firearm to target a school van in an incident that killed a five-year-old girl and injured seven others in scenic town in Pakistan’s northwest on Tuesday, confessed to his crime and said “devil made him do it,” police officials confirmed on Friday.
The incident took place in Swat which was once a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, formally called the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), before security forces launched a military operation in 2009 to reclaim the area. Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai also survived an assassination attempt in the same valley after she was shot in the head by a TTP militant in 2012.
The police constable, identified as Alam Khan, was deployed to provide security to a public school before the shooting incident. The provincial administration of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), where Swat is located, constituted an inquiry committee to investigate Khan’s motives and run a background check on him to see if he had links with any banned militant outfits.
“Constable Alam Khan has confessed to the crime twice, once during the initial police investigation and the second time when he was brought before a judicial magistrate,” Swat’s district police officer (DPO) Shafiullah Gandapur told Arab News.
“He told the judicial magistrate and the police that some evil thoughts had crept into his mind and it was devil who made him do it.”
Gandapur added the inquiry committee constituted by the KP government visited Swat to probe the case during this week.
“The committee has almost completed its investigation and the draft of its findings will soon be submitted to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa administration,” he said.
The DPO informed Khan would also undergo a psychological evaluation.
“This is a high-profile case and we want to investigate it fairly and transparently,” he added.
Meanwhile, the family of Ayesha Abid, who lost her life in the shooting incident, expressed shock at the senseless act of violence.
“On that day, my niece was making excuses since she did not want to go to the school, but her mother forcibly sent her,” Hayat Ali, Abid’s uncle, told Arab News.
He informed the five-year-old had been enrolled in playgroup at the Sangota Public School only a few months ago.
“She was alive while she was taken to hospital,” he added. “[I cannot imagine what] pain she was going through while she was on her way to the Saidu Teaching Hospital.”
“We don’t want justice only for ourselves but for everyone,” Ali said. “We have lost our child, and she will not return even if [the police] kill the person who is in their custody.”
The KP government ordered the police to carry out psychological evaluation of all law enforcement personnel on security duties following the incident, adding the procedure must be repeated twice a year.
Gun violence targeting children is rare in Pakistan.
However, nearly 150 people, mostly students, were killed in 2014 when TTP militants attacked a school in Peshawar, the capital of KP province.
Since then, the authorities have deployed police at schools across the country, especially in the volatile northwest where the Pakistani Taliban have stepped up attacks on security forces in recent months.
