An alarming scenario

There has always been violence on the streets of Karachi. Pick up any newspaper any day and you will find news of people shot down in cold blood or found dead in their homes in mysterious circumstances. However, the alarming thing now is that the victims are increasingly professionals and businessmen. Just in the last three months there have been murders of a successful businessman and that of a doctor and his family.

The latter incident is being termed as a suicide though, like in the Mir Raza Ali case, the theory of suicide did not stand up to investigation, and many assumptions have been proved wrong, and the final report from the medical board categorically stated that the evidence was inconsistent with suicide.

Another businessman Imran Gogun, who owned a paint factory, was shot dead in his car in Ayub Goth. This was not a robbery as there was cash and mobile phones in the car which were not taken away. Apparently, it was a targeted attack. Now the latest casualty is a doctor and his family of three daughters and a wife.

The untimely death of the doctor and his family was discovered after neighbours were warned by a foul smell who called police who broke down the door to find the doctor and his three daughters and wife lying dead in different rooms.

The doctor had been without a job for some time and had only recently joined a hospital. According to initial reports by people who entered this unfortunate house it seemed that the financial condition of the doctor was at rock bottom as the kitchen in the house was almost empty. There was just one egg in the refrigerator and no flour and no money of any denomination was found in the entire apartment. Unfortunately, the doctor had been robbed of his salary a few days back.

Later he resigned from the hospital as he had been diagnosed with cancer and had expressed his wish to go to Punjab for treatment. The wife of the doctor in desperation had offered to sell her oven to a neighbour, but the neighbour had instead loaned her two thousand rupees.

No doubt that these people had been living precariously and hardly surviving but still the thought of putting their innocent three daughters to death does not seem plausible. There are many questions that remain unanswered in this whole episode.

Among other things that require an answer is the question why he would commit suicide if he had just been offered a job in a reputable hospital? Also the idea for me that a doctor in Karachi can ever be so hard up that he had had only one egg in his refrigerator and no other eatables in the house is rather unacceptable.

Doctors in Karachi, as far as I know, are doing well, and it is hard for me to believe that there was a doctor in Karachi who could not advice or treat at least one patient in a day and receive enough money to buy a dozen eggs, some milk and other necessary items for his family.

There is more to it than meets the eye - like a stage set to direct the investigators to a certain conclusion but maybe they overdid this. There are rumours of a property dispute with his brother, and obviously they had been estranged as he arrived a day after [the incident] and did not stay for long or expressed his desire that the mystery of this tragic occurrence be thoroughly investigated.

By all accounts the tragic “suicide” of the doctor and his family also pinpoints to the hardships that the ordinary person is facing in an atmosphere of rising prices of daily use items, and, of course, the unbridled lawlessness that one witnesses every day on our streets that claims the lives of citizens directly or indirectly. It is really alarming that suddenly the level of violence in Karachi has increased with daily police encounters with bandits and some of these resulting in death of ordinary citizens.

Maybe more efforts are required to stem this wave of violence as presently things seem to be getting out of control.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026