Pakistan remands six soldiers in park killing

A Pakistani anti-terrorism court on Monday remanded six paramilitary soldiers into police custody over the videoed killing of an unarmed man in a public park that shocked the nation. "Administrative judge Maqbool Baqar of the anti-terrorism court has remanded six Rangers personnel and a civilian Afsar Khan to police custody for two days until Wednesday," provincial prosecutor general Shahadat Awan told reporters. The Rangers staff were named as Shahid Zafar, Mohammad Afzal, Bahadur Rehman, Manthar Ali, Liaquat Ali and Mohammad Tariq. Two of them, Zafar and Afzal, had been remanded for a first time on Friday. Khan was seen dragging the victim over to the paramilitary personnel in television footage and accused him of robbery. Security forces shot dead Sarfaraz Shah, 22, in a Karachi park last Wednesday over the robbery accusations, but his family has demanded justice, insisting he was an innocent student. The supreme court on Friday demanded that the government remove within three days Major General Aijaz Chaudhry, head of the paramilitary in Sindh province, and Sindh police chief Fayyaz Leghari, over the killing. But neither the interior ministry nor Leghari could be reached for comment as the deadline expired Monday, while a spokesman for the paramilitary declined to comment. Widely aired footage of the killing showed a clean-shaven man wearing black trousers and a navy shirt pleading for his life as a soldier cocked his rifle at his neck, then shot him twice in the hand and thigh. As his blood poured onto the ground, the man begged for help from soldiers -- who appeared to do nothing but watch -- until he fell unconscious. The incident mirrored the killings last month in the southwestern Baluchistan province of five unarmed Chechens, one of them a pregnant woman, that are also under investigation.