RECENTLY, Karachi’s police surgeon wrote that in four years on the job, she had never felt this helpless. Her search for truth and justice had met obstacles before, she said. This time it was asphyxiating. “Tired. Too tired.” By 7:52 that evening the post was gone.

Dr Summaiya Tariq examines the dead for a living. Her job is to establish what was done to people who can no longer say it themselves. She had not been quiet. Days earlier, she had written to a senior police officer setting out 14 deficiencies in the first postmortem of Mir Raza, the 25-year-old man found in the bushes at Gulistan-i-Jauhar in Karachi. No X-ray. No swabs for gunshot residue. No DNA sample. The skull and neck not opened. Then she went on television and said the wounds described did not match one another, while stressing she had not examined the body herself. That is the sort of precision that tells you what kind of witness she is. It is also the reason the grave was opened.

This is not a story about a woman stopped from speaking. She was not stopped; she was answered. The police issued a statement about the harm her observations might do to the investigation. The medical board she convened........

© Dawn