[2] The victims were identified as grocery store owner Mohammad Khalil, his wife Nabila, their 13-year-old daughter Areeba and their friend who was driving the car, Zeeshan Javed.
After video of the Khalil's son surfaced where he claimed that the deceased in the encounter were his parents, the story took a turn and the CTD changed its stance, declaring only the driver named Zeeshan as terrorist affiliated with ISIS.
News channel reported that in an encounter against suspected kidnappers, law enforcers killed two women among four persons allegedly in a ‘gun battle’ to recover children.
[12] Fawad Chaudhry, the federal information minister, while commenting over the Counter Terrorism Department's action in Sahiwal asserted that all those killed were terrorist and they apparently used the family as human shield.
[15] The Counter Terrorism Department, in a statement detailing its version of Saturday's alleged encounter in Sahiwal that left four people, including two women, dead, claimed that the “terrorist” driving the car shot at the police when intercepted.
One witness said the elite police forced the vehicle to stop and fired at the car occupants from a close range, which was later confirmed in autopsy reports.
[17] Provincial Minister for Information and Culture, Fayyaz-ul-Hassan Chohan, on Tuesday said that the preliminary report submitted by the Joint Investigation Team on the Sahiwal incident has transpired that deceased Khalil and his family were innocent, whereas Zeeshan belonged to a terrorist group.
13-year-old Areeba was shot four times as per the postmortem report, which indicated that brutality of the law enforcing forces,[23] The counsel of family of Sahiwal incident victims on Monday called for providing security to his clients in the wake of alleged threats from some officials of Counter Terrorism Department.
The law experts started arguing that the anti-terrorism department has cunningly saved its high-profile officers by citing the name of a sub-inspector as an in-charge of the Sahiwal operation, in the FIR of the case.
[34] Qamar Zaman Kaira, rejected the joint investigation team (JIT), formed by the government, demanding formation of a judicial commission to probe the Sahiwal killings.
[39] Leader of Opposition in the Punjab Assembly Hamza Shehbaz Sharif called for holding a judicial inquiry into the tragic incident of Sahiwal.
[40] Party's spokesperson Marriyum Aurangzeb has called on Prime Minister Imran Khan to own up to his past claims and resign after accepting responsibility for the Sahiwal catastrophe instead of optics.