Source: The News
The family of six-and-a-half-year-old Hamza Sabir, who died on Chaand Raat (Sunday) due to aerial firing, is confused about who they can hold accountable for the child’s death. They want to know if the unknown shooter is responsible for the child’s death, or if the police and the government, who failed to control aerial firing, should be held accountable.
Sabir’s family said that the child had only wished to see the moon with his own eyes on Chand Raat, and for this he was hit by the bullet of an unknown shooter’s “celebratory fire”. His maternal grandfather, Mehboob-ur-Rahman, said that after Ifari and prayers, the entire family, including Sabir and his mother, sat before the TV to find out whether the Shawwal moon had been sighted. “After learning through some TV channels that the moon has been sighted, some elders of the family decided to go up to the roof to see the moon themselves,” he said.
Sabir, who studied in the first grade at a private school in Manzoor Colony, accompanied them. Rahman recalled with tears in his eyes that there was a lot of noise of aerial firing all around in his area, even though there were clouds in the sky and it was not possible to see the moon in Karachi. Sabir asked his mother, 27-year-old Tayyaba Bibi, to hold him up in her arms so that he could see the moon.
Rahman said that Sabir’s mother held him high in her arms, and then suddenly cried loudly when she realised that something had happened to her son. Sabir’s grandmother ran to Tayyaba, and saw that the child was hanging limply in his mother’s lap, with blood dripping from near his temple.
“I rushed to a nearby dispensary to get a doctor for Hamza but no doctor was available there. I was barefoot, and went to another private hospital which is situated a little farther from my home,” Rahman said. The family live in Junejo Town, which is adjacent with Manzoor Colony. The Baloch Colony police station is within walking distance of their house.
Rahman said that when doctors at the private hospital heard about the incident, they asked him to go to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC), because they could not handle a “police case”.
“I contacted a few rickshaw drivers to help us to take Hamza to the JPMC but they also refused to do so,” Rahman said. Luckily, his tenant had a car, which was used to take the child to the JPMC, where the family was informed that Sabir had died long before reaching the hospital. Sabir was buried the same night at the Qayyumabad graveyard.
His parents had separated a while ago, and Sabir and his mother were living at his maternal grandparents’ house.
Rahman said that the child had been extremely excited about Eid. “He made his mother iron his clothes under his own supervision, and insisted on polishing his shoes himself,” he said.
Since the death of her son, Tayyaba Bibi has remained unconscious most of the time. Whenever she wakes up, she mourns the death of her only child, and then faints again.
Before the child was buried, the family registered a case at the police station concerned. “The police visited my home, and asked me to tell them which direction the bullet [which hit Sabit] came from,” Rahman said. “Instead of finding the people who were involved in aerial firing on that day, the police are asking us about the direction of the bullet. How could we have known which direction the bullet came from?”
That sad thing is that the child’s life could have been saved if the doctors at the hospital did something instead of telling them to go elsewhere.
If you’re unlucky enough to get hit by a bullet then you’re on your own because nobody wants to get involved in a “police case”