LAHORE – Gunmen on motorbikes shot and killed a 45-year-old professor of ophthalmology and his 12-year-old son in Lahore’s posh locality of Gulberg early on Monday in what appeared to be a well-coordinated sectarian attack.
No group claimed the responsibility for the attack. But intelligence sources said the possibility of involvement of militants linked to banned outfits, notably Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, in this deadly assault could not be ruled out.
Police officials said four unidentified gunmen, riding on two motorcycles, raked the vehicle of eye surgeon Prof Dr Syed Ali Haider with gunfire near Forman Christian College while he was taking his son to his college. Dr Haider escaped the first hail of bullets as he accelerated his Honda vehicle to escape the assassination bid. The attackers, however, chased him down at a traffic signal on Canal Bank Road and opened fire at his car. The doctor and his son, Ali Murtaza, received fatal gunshot wounds, investigators said while adding the attackers fled the scene with their automatic weapons.
“Syed Ali Haider sustained multiple bullet wounds and died on the spot. His son was rushed to the Services Hospital but he could not survive,” a rescue official said. The bodies were moved to a morgue for autopsy.
The abrupt shooting on Zahoor Elahi Road and Canal Bank Road triggered panic among road-users and motorists as they ran towards safer places leaving their vehicles behind, witnesses said, and added it was thirty minutes after the incident that a police party reached the crime spot and launched a search operation after marking off the entire locality. Entry and exit points were closed down and snap checking was intensified. No arrest could be made as investigation into the double-murder case was in progress until the filing of this report.  Dr Haider, an eye-specialist at the Lahore General Hospital, was a resident of Hali Road, Gulberg.
Meanwhile, dozens of relatives and friends of the victim reached the spot and protested the gruesome killings. Later, scores of religious activists belonging to the Shia community staged protests across the city.
Earlier in October last year, a Shia leader, Syed Shakir Ali Rizvi, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Lahore.
According to sources, Dr Haider was the only son of Prof Zafar Haider and Prof Tahira Bokhari. Having graduated from King Edward Medical College in 1987, he proceeded to the United Kingdom and returned to serve the people of his country after completing FRCS in Ophthalmology. Dr Haider rose quickly to become a professor of ophthalmology.