KARACHI: Police on Thursday claimed to have made a major breakthrough in the case of Mir Raza Ali after recovering a spent cartridge casing from the crime scene in Gulistan-i-Jauhar.

Raza, an IBA graduate and owner of the eatery Wafflix, went missing on July 28. The 25-year-old’s body was found a day later with a gunshot wound in bushes near Shahi Qila Ground in Gulistan-i-Jauhar.

Special Investigation Unit (SIU) Senior Superintendent of Police Dr Samiullah Soomro, who heads the probe team, told Dawn that the police recovered “a fired bullet shell from the crime scene during a meticulously planned search operation”.

He added that a special search team, comprising four station house officers (SHOs) and 40 constables, was formed to conduct a comprehensive examination of the crime scene.

Equipped with metal detectors and other equipment, the team divided the area into four sectors, with each unit assigned a separate search pattern and sector to ensure complete coverage of the scene.

“The painstaking search resulted in the recovery of a fired bullet shell from a location consistent with the projected bullet trajectory in relation to the position of the deceased,” said the officer, terming it a “major breakthrough”.

Investigators described the recovery as a critical piece of physical evidence and expected it to play a “pivotal role” in forensic examination, ballistic analysis and reconstruction of the sequence of events surrounding the incident.

Earlier today, a Karachi court issued an order to exhume Ali’s remains for further investigation.

The court issued the order on an application filed by Ali’s father, after a controversy emerged between the Karachi police surgeon and investigators over alleged loopholes in the medico-legal report regarding the post-mortem examination.

In its order, the court directed the police surgeon and the Sindh health secretary to constitute a medico-legal board for the exhumation of Ali’s body “under intimation to this court at the earliest possible date and time”.

The court order, issued after the ruling by Judicial Magistrate Hameedullah, stated that Ali’s father, Mir Hussain Ali Khan, had filed an application seeking the exhumation of his son’s body in accordance with law.

He also requested the formation of a medico-legal board, comprising senior forensic experts and pathologists, under the Karachi police surgeon “to conduct a fresh and comprehensive” medico-legal examination and postmortem, as well as X-ray, DNA, forensic and chemical examination of the body to ascertain the actual cause of death.

The case took a turn when Karachi Police Surgeon Dr Summaiya Syed told a private news channel on Tuesday that the postmortem findings of Ali’s body had raised several questions, as some observations in the report did not appear to match the available photographs.

She said the reported entry wound, bullet trajectory and exit wound did not correspond with one another. While it was scientifically possible for a bullet to enter through the back and exit from the front, she stressed that her assessment was based only on the postmortem report and photographs, as she had not examined the body herself.

The police surgeon noted that entry wounds were typically smaller than exit wounds in firearm cases. She also said that gunshot residue, commonly found on the hands in suspected suicides, was not tested for in this case.