It has all the Ingredients of a potboiler Bollywood Thriller, yet very tragic end of a Bangalore Student.

A college student fleeing from the police after racing his bike down a main city thoroughfare was shot dead by Army guards after he tried to hide on the roof of a Brigadier’s house in the military area early Sunday.

A night of revelry ended in tragedy for Mohammed Mukarram Pasha. Mukarram, a 19-year-old first year B.Com student of Bangalore’s Baldwin Methodist’s College, and his friend were driving their motorcycle “well over the speed limit”, police said.

It was 1 am (Early Sunday Morning – 28th December 2008) when the Ulsoor traffic night patrol saw him riding `wheelie’ — on the back wheel with the front wheel up — and trying to zig-zag around the median near ASC Circle. The cops started chasing them. When they tried to flee, their bike skidded near ASC Circle. Mukarram and his friend abandoned the bike and started running.

While his friend managed to flee, Mukarram jumped the fence of an Army compound – ASC Records (South) – and started running frantically on the campus. Later, he climbed the rooftop of Brig. P S Ravindranath’s residence — also known as the Flag Staff House — which is just a barb-wired fence away from the military campus, on Trinity Church Road, in the heart of the city, at 1.10 am.

From the rooftop, Mukarram started making frantic calls to his friends and family. Security guards on night duty, who were searching for him, realized Mukarram was on the roof around 1.50 am, and asked him to come down.

There were six security guards — four on duty at the Brigadier’s house and another two from the military campus. They said to have warned the boy several times but he tried to run, and one of the guards shot him with a service weapon at 2.08 am. They fired two rounds (six bullets), of which one bullet hit Mukarram near the abdomen. The Brigadier informed the police control room about the incident.

According to police, Mukarram managed to jump the barricade after the bullet hit him. He had earlier called up his friends to pick him up, and a car was waiting for him. They rushed him to St Philomena’s Hospital at 2.20 am, where the doctors declared him “brought dead”. But at the hospital, there were no records of who admitted him, except for a phone number. By 2.35 am, police reached the hospital where his family had also arrived.

Brigadier P S Ravindranath, who spoke to the media, said he was sleeping when the incident took place and he called the police control room immediately after the incident.

Mukarram’s father Mushtaq Ahmed Khan, alias Babu, is a bus owner. The family stays in BTM Layout 1st stage.

The city police have registered a case against Mukarram. The guards who fired upon the student won’t face any action. City police commissioner Shankar Bidari said, “We have registered a case under Sections 448 and 103 of the IPC for trespassing. I have also ordered an inquiry by the additional commissioner of police (law and order).” There won’t be any action against the guards as the incident took place in a restricted army location.

The defence authorities in a statement said the Flag Staff House was “intruded by a man being chased by the police”. Senior army officers said around 1 am on Sunday, a man managed to enter the house. “After thorough search, the sentries on guard sensed the presence of somebody on the top of the house. Before the guards could apprehend the intruder, he jumped down and fled towards the compound wall towards the main road. When the intruder did not heed the armed guard’s warning to surrender, the intruder was fired upon,” the statement said.

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