Cars accompanying the motorcade of former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif crushed a child to death in Lalmusa of Pakistan’s Gujrat district, Dawn reported on Friday. The child was among a crowd of supporters who had gathered to meet the ousted Pakistan prime minister. An investigation into his death has been initiated.
While Dawn said the child was aged nine, AFP quote a police official who said he was 13. “A 13-year-old boy who had came to see the rally was hit by a car in the convoy,” Sajid Ali, head of the local Lalamusa police station, told AFP.
After one of the cars hit the child, other vehicles belonging to the Elite Force ran over him without halting. The boy’s father lost consciousness following the incident and was taken to a nearby hospital.
Addressing a political gathering in Gujranwala later in the day, Sharif offered condolences to the family of the deceased and promised to visit them. He called the boy “the first martyr” in his struggle for strengthening democracy in Pakistan, and led a prayer for him. Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique echoed the former PM, calling the child the “first martyr of this struggle, which is aimed at bringing the supremacy of law and justice to everyone in the country.”