Pakistani authorities claim officers came under fire first before returning shots in the mistaken identity killing of nine-year-old Australian girl Hania Ahmad, despite her father insisting police initiated the gunfight.
Authorities held a press conference on Tuesday, local time, to address the killing of Ahmad and the serious injuring of her brother and father at the hands of a state police officer in Pakistan last week.
There are conflicting accounts of how the incident unfolded in Chakwal, near the country’s capital of Islamabad, on June 10.
The Ahmad family were visiting from Perth and had stopped in to see a family member when two thieves pulled up next to their rental car and attempted to steal jewellery from the family. A Crime Control Department official saw the robbery unfold, and attempted to intervene.
The accounts from Hania’s father Adeel and other family members have differed from those of law enforcement on what followed, with Crime Control Department officials telling reporters the “robbers shot first”, before taking off down a nearby lane.
Hania’s father Adeel drove the family’s rental car away from the scene, but it was peppered with bullets after the CCD official thought the thieves had taken the car and were attempting to make a getaway.
Adeel said he believed the guns fired at them were AK-47s, and bullets caused the car’s brakes to fail before the car crashed into the gate of a nearby home. Adeel and his son were seriously injured, while Hania died at the scene. Hania’s mother Sidra was uninjured but is understood to be in shock.
Adeel Ahmad has previously disputed law enforcement’s official version of what happened, claiming to SBS Urdu the CCD officer had fired first.
“All of the firing was initiated by the CCD when we were being robbed,” he said.
“The thieves fired back after they were shot at.”
The two thieves involved in the initial robbery of the family were also reportedly fatally shot by police just hours after Hania’s death.
At the press conference, Pakistani law enforcement officials said they had identified “grave errors” in the officers conduct, but again reiterated they believed the officer had been fired upon first.
“In incidents of these sorts, the officer needs to make a positive identity of the target before firing, and the firing needs to be in self defence,” they said.
“We believe the officer in this case was fired upon but the officer did not make a positive identity.
“The officer should have also aimed at the tyres of the car, which was not done, and it’s a grave error that led to the death of the girl.”
Officials said it was tragic the incident had ended in the death of an “innocent, beautiful” girl. A CCD officer is under investigation over the incident, and local media outlet Dawn has reported he has been arrested under a charge of murder.
“The investigation of this case will be transparent. We have engaged the family and have ensured that they will work with us, and they are being informed daily,” they said.
Adeel Ahmad has previously expressed frustration the department has not handed the family CCTV from the incident.
“The CCD people are incredibly incompetent, they are not professional and are brainless, they just have guns and all they do is shoot,” he said.
However, officials said the family were on board with the work they had done so far.
“The family is satisfied with the state of investigation and have said they are confident it will deliver justice,” they said.
The Crime Control Department in Pakistan was established last year in a bid to crack down on organised crime, but human rights advocates in the region say it has been controversial from its inception due to its frequently engaging in extrajudicial killings and staged “encounters” with people in custody.
It said since the CCD began, there had been 924 deaths of suspects during “encounters”, with only two police officers killed over the same period. The Commission said this amounted to more than two fatal encounters daily in Pakistan.
The Ahmad family incident has been compared with what is known in Pakistan as the Sahiwal shooting in 2019, where the Punjab Counter Terrorism Department opened fire on a car, killing three members of the same family and their neighbour.
Officials claimed they had been acting on high-level intelligence and were aiming to kill four terrorists linked to an Islamic State group, but the family’s surviving nine-year-old son later told reporters said his family had been stopped at a toll booth while on the way to a wedding.
“My father told them to take our money and not to shoot their guns. But they started firing,” Umair said in the video.
Footage from the shooting began to spread on social media, and according to the BBC it showed police firing at the car, finding the surviving children, before driving away with them, shooting at the car again.
The incident eventually led to the arrests of a number of officers, and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan expressed his shock at the shooting.
Hania Ahmad’s death has already drawn comparison with the case, with academics saying while the two departments who had carried out the shootings were different, it illustrated a systemic problem in Pakistani’s broader law enforcement.
Legal expert Abuzar Salman Khan Niazi said on X the incident was emblematic of Pakistan’s policing model.
“What the CCD did in Chakwal was neither a case of mistaken identification nor merely an instance of negligence,” he said.
“It was, in fact, an expected outcome of the policing model adopted by the Punjab government. This incident cannot be viewed in isolation; rather, it reflects the consequences of a system that prioritises encounter-based policing over legal procedures and the rule of law.
“The real issue is the culture of impunity under which the CCD appears to operate, where there seems to be little fear of accountability because officers believe they will not face meaningful consequences for their actions.
“This confidence stems from political patronage and institutional backing. Even more fundamentally, the CCD appears to be operating outside any clearly defined constitutional or legal framework, with inadequate oversight.”
The CCD was contacted for comment.
It is expected the officer charged with Hania Ahmad’s murder will be before the court in coming days.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
