This picture was taken on 8th April at 10:00 pm at the Aura Grande Complex at E-11/4 in Islamabad, where family and friends gathered to honor their deceased friend Haji Ramzan’s son’s marriage. The invitation came to me from his handicapped son, the brave Nauman Khan, who tries to fill the vacuum left by his father by reaching out to family and friends on his behalf, despite being wheelchair-bound after breaking his spinal cord in a car accident.
It was during his rehabilitation at the Armed Forces Institute in Rawalpindi that he became friends with many handicapped friends, each with a different story of misfortune that struck them like a bolt from the blue, changing their world from better to worse in the blink of an eye.
The boy in the picture is Syed Muhammad Fahad, a chartered accountant who serves with a multinational firm. His story would even astonish Katherine Schellman, author of the bestselling mystery novel “Midnight Murder.” This real-life story dates back to 2016, at 3 pm, in the sprawling neighborhood of F-11.
A woman who later allegedly confessed her crime to the police allegedly hired killers from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to kill her husband. As luck would have it, the security alarm on Fahad’s car went off, and the criminals, busy with their job inside the house, thought it was a deliberate act to raise an alarm from the neighborhood.
As they came out of the house, they found Fahad fiddling with his remote control key to turn off the alarm and shot him at first sight, piercing his spinal cord. Ever since, Fahad has been running from pillar to post for justice in the courts, with all incriminating evidence, yet the criminals, all identified, were let off by the lower court, giving them the benefit of doubt and adjudicating the incident as accidental rather than premeditated.
The matter is now in the higher court, and if by any chance this write-up reaches any of the esteemed judges from the superior judiciary, I would request them to give no benefit of doubt to the criminals, as their actions have destroyed a young man’s life.
The young man needs to be heard and compensated by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the custodian of trillion-dollar mineral deposits, as proudly claimed by the Honorable Prime Minister. However, what good are these trillions to an ordinary young man like Fahad, who was shot, and the culprits were arrested, tried, and released?.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan must win back its lost credibility by standing with the weak against the mighty as it has already weakened itself to a point of begging other nations for survival and and not far from now young men like Fahad will be begging others for justice than his own countrymen who were supposed to give him justice.
