SUKKUR: The Khairpur police on Tuesday claimed to have gunned down three notorious dacoits in a gun battle, which the bereaved families termed a ‘staged encounter’.

According to SHO Nooruddin Kunharo of Khairpur district’s Kot Lalo police station, a gang of dacoits was busy looting commuters by blocking a road near the Maghya area. Upon receiving the information, a police party rushed to the spot and challenged the gang, he said, adding that the gang opened fire, which was returned.

During the encounter, three dacoits were killed but their accomplices managed to escape, the SHO said.

The police later identified the killed suspects as Aqib alias Aqu Shar (who carried a Rs3 million bounty), Ghulam Mujtaba Shar and Maula Bakhsh Shar.

The SHO also claimed to have seized one Kalashnikov rifle and two pistols from the dead suspects.

Khairpur SSP Dr Samiullah Soomro said that the killed suspects were wanted by police in more than 60 cases of heinous crime, including encounters resulting in the martyrdom of some police officers, murder, dacoity, highway robbery and act of terrorism.

As soon as the police issued information about the killings in the alleged encounter, the bereaved families came out with strong condemnation of, what they claimed, cold blooded murder of their family members.

Protesting outside the hospital where they had assembled to collect the bodies, they told media personnel that the Kot Lalo SHO had called Aqib, Ghulam Mujtaba and Maula Bukhsh to the police station for a settlement of the families’ dispute with a feudal lord of the area.

“The police detained them and later took them to the specified area, where they were gunned down in a staged encounter,” the bereaved families claimed.

They also alleged that the police team dumped the bodies at the entrance of the hospital and drove away without going for medico-legal formalities. “We were not allowed to take away the bodies for the next five hours for want of legal formalities. Finally, the police team returned to the hospital and completed the formalities,” they alleged.

The police, however, insisted that the bodies were handed over to the hospital staff and legal formalities were performed before they left the health facility.