Daily Times

KARACHI: The suspect in the Shahrah-e-Faisal firing incident, Adnan Pasha, appeared before the city court on Wednesday for proceedings pertaining to the case.

Police brought in the suspect who is accused of firing shots at Karachi’s busy Shahrah-e-Faisal road and issuing challenges to police and Rangers personnel.

Police claimed that Adnan Pasha had been arrested in a raid conducted at the Gulistan-e-Jauhar area following the release of his second video after he had obtained bail.

The court had accepted Pasha’s bail for Rs 50,000.

He was taken into custody from District East area on Tuesday. He was arrested after a case was registered against him by Zeeshan Saeed. In the FIR, Saeed held that Pasha warned him of dire consequences in the video and also accused him of involvement in his father’s killing.

Pasha’s video had gone viral on social media in which he can be seen brandishing a pistol on an empty road of the city. Minutes later, he can be seen firing shots on the road that he claimed was Shahra-e-Faisal in Karachi.

The video raised alarm bells among city residents since it brought back memories of days when law enforcement agencies were struggling to maintain order as countless criminal gangs operated from different areas and street crime was on a record high in many parts of the city.

Using foul language in the video, Pasha can be seen throwing a challenge with the following words: ‘to stop me if you can’. It is not clear as to who he is challenging.

However, after the video went viral on social media and news channels also aired it, Pasha recorded another video in which he apologised for the shooting incident and claimed that he was not issuing a challenge to police or to the Rangers, apparently realising that the ambiguity in the video could lead the viewers to conclude that he was addressing the law enforcers. In the second video, he clarified that the challenge was addressed to a person who had been involved in the murder of his father. Sindh Home Minister Sohail Anwar Siyal later took notice of the incident and ordered police to arrest Pasha after the video went viral.

Published in Daily Times, March 1^st 2018.