President Dr Arif Alvi on Saturday visited the house of the child who died last month from a bullet a policeman had shot at fleeing robber but it missed the target and accidently hit her. The policeman has been taken into custody and the case is in the investigation stage. During the visit, the president condoled with the family and assured them that action would be taken against the official as well as at the departmental level to prevent such incidents from repeating in future. According to the details, the deceased, identified as Amel, her parents and a sibling were in a car stopped at a signal on Korangi Road in the Akhtar Colony area when a robber stopped them and asked the family to surrender valuables at gunpoint. He snatched Amel’s mother’s cell phone and hand bag and was fleeing the scene when the family heard a gunshot. Speaking to the media on Saturday, Umer, the father of the deceased child, said, “My children were sitting on the backseat. The moment I heard the gunshot I checked on them and saw Amel lying down and bleeding,” he said, adding that the family was hurried towards the nearby National Medical Centre. When the family reached the hospital, they were told that since the case involved medico-legal formalities, they should head to a public health facility. Beenish, the mother of the deceased child, said that the hospital did not even help the family arrange an ambulance for the child who kept bleeding all this while. By the time they arranged an ambulance on their own, it was too late and the child had already passed away when the family brought her to Jinnah hospital. In a blog the mother wrote after the incident, she had said, “The whole system failed when my 10-year-old in Karachi was shot by a stray police bullet.” Earlier Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Saqib Nisar had also taken notice on the child’s death through a suo moto notice. The matter is fixed for hearing on September 25. Published in Daily Times, September 23rd 2018.