It’s been almost two months since Mir Raza Ali’s body turned up in a patch of bushes in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, and if you’ve been following this case even loosely, you’ll know it hasn’t gone the way anyone expected at the start. What began as a “was it suicide or wasn’t it” debate has, slowly and painfully, turned into something else entirely, a hard look at whether the police even did their job properly.
The autopsy that changed the whole conversation
For weeks, the official line leaned toward suicide. Then came the second postmortem, and everything shifted. After Raza’s family pushed back, hard, against the initial narrative, his body was exhumed and re-examined by a fresh medical board. Police themselves confirmed by the end of August that this second report ruled out suicide entirely. He’d been shot, yes, but the pattern of injuries simply didn’t match someone taking their own life. Earlier findings had already hinted at this, showing he’d suffered multiple injuries and had been shot from behind, which made the suicide theory very hard to defend.
For a family that had been saying this from day one, it must have felt like finally being heard.
Murder, officially, now
Once suicide was off the table, the case had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. The investigation moved from Ferozabad police station, where it started as a kidnapping case, over to Zaman Town, and a murder charge was formally added. The officer now leading things, DSP Siraj Lashari, told the Sindh High Court they were essentially starting over, this time leaning on CCTV footage and digital records rather than assumptions. A bullet casing has been recovered, but the weapon itself is still missing, which tells you how much is still unresolved here.
There’s also been a strange financial thread running through all of this. Police pulled four years of Raza’s cryptocurrency trading history from Binance, after a friend of his mentioned during testimony that the two of them used to trade together, though the friend had stepped away from it while Raza reportedly kept going.
Where the real drama has been happening
Honestly, the most revealing part of this whole saga hasn’t been the police investigation itself, it’s been the judicial commission set up to watch over it. Headed by Justice Omar Sial of the Sindh High Court, this commission has turned into something close to a public reckoning for how the case was mishandled early on.
The family didn’t even want this commission at first, they’d asked for a joint investigation team instead and took it to court over it. The Sindh High Court decided not to interfere with the commission’s work, though it left the door open for the family to pursue other options if they remained unhappy.
And they’ve had plenty to be unhappy about. At one hearing, Justice Sial more or less tore into the case’s first investigating officer, telling him the probe looked like nothing more than a box-ticking exercise and that he ought to lose his job over it. Questions kept piling up, why hadn’t the bullet or holster been found, why had postmortem samples been kept in an officer’s personal custody instead of being properly logged, why did basic evidence handling look this sloppy for a case this serious.
Witness after witness has been called in, Raza’s business partner, his friends, the cab driver who drove him that early morning, Edhi volunteers, even gardeners from the area. One detail that stuck out: his business partner told the commission that his smartwatch had been pinging with payment notifications involving several people, and that overdue payments had been causing tension. There was even a testy exchange inside the commission itself, when Sindh’s Advocate General tried to interrupt the family’s lawyer during questioning, Justice Sial pushed back firmly, and the Sindh government ended up issuing something close to a public apology over it.
So where does that leave things now?
As of the most recent hearing in mid-September, the commission was already on its eighth sitting, still sifting through new documents. It even turned down a request from the doctor who conducted the original, now-discredited autopsy to add anything further, after he’d apparently been speaking about the case on social media instead of through proper channels. Meanwhile, police filed an interim charge sheet without naming anyone as a suspect, and were given until September 21 to submit something more final.
Nobody’s been arrested. The gun is still missing. But something has genuinely shifted in the last month, this isn’t just a murder mystery anymore, it’s become a question of accountability, aimed squarely at the people who were supposed to solve it in the first place.
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