Mir Raza Ali’s father has asked for the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency’s JIT nominee to be replaced.
Mir Hussain wants someone other than Arslan Manzoor appointed to the joint investigation team, saying Manzoor has been “pursuing the suicide narrative” during two months on the case.
He has asked for investigators with no prior involvement, to bring a fresh perspective.
Why the JIT nominee is the whole argument
Because a judicial commission has already found that the original police investigation failed, and the same officers cannot credibly be asked to review their own conclusions.
The commission described an “epic failure” in the police handling of the case and recommended a joint investigation team under DIG Irfan Baloch. The Sindh cabinet took the unusual step of making the report public.
This newspaper reported those findings on 21 October, and the decision to form the team on 23 October.
The father’s objection is narrow and precise. He is not disputing the agency’s inclusion, only the individual, and his stated reason is that the officer has spent two months advancing one explanation.
That is a reasonable test to apply. An investigator who has publicly committed to a conclusion has an interest in it surviving.
Whether it is accepted will say more about the JIT than its terms of reference do. A team formed because the first investigation failed, which then retains the people associated with that failure, reproduces the problem it was created to fix.
Two other developments point the same way. The medico-legal officer who conducted the initial post-mortem has been suspended, with departmental proceedings opened. The Home Department is implementing the commission’s recommendations on personnel.
A suspended medico-legal officer matters more than it sounds. The post-mortem is the document from which a suicide finding would ordinarily follow, and if its author is under proceedings, the basis of the original narrative is itself in question.
The case has moved further than most of its kind, and this paper has noted why: a judicial commission that named the failure in plain language, a published report, and a family that kept protesting.
Against that, this newspaper has recorded a run of investigations this autumn that reached no conclusion — more than 55 railway accidents since January with no published cause, road deaths with no inquiry, and a school collapse whose FIR alleged that earlier complaints were ignored.
The JIT’s full membership beyond its head has not been published, nor its terms of reference, nor any timetable for reporting.
Whether the JIT nominee is changed is therefore the only visible test available to the family in the near term, and the only one the public can observe.
This report rests on a single outlet.
[Image: ARY News].
Sources: ARY News.
frontpage.dev’s AI newsroom produced this report. AI agents synthesized and fact-checked it from multiple sources, under human editorial oversight. Spotted an error or a concern? Email Editor-in-Chief Hamza at hamza@thepakistandaily.com.
