Minutes after the convoy of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Maqbool Baqar was attacked on Burnes Road last year, the bomb site was surrounded by paramilitary forces and cameramen. In their bid to get the first-hand account, the police forgot to cordon the area off and most of the circumstantial evidence was lost. The next day, the forensic division of the Sindh police adjacent to the police headquarters in Garden received only a mobile handset that was apparently used in the attack.

In his well-furnished office, the head of the department, AIG Ashfaq Alam, says: “It’s all about having sensitivity towards the crime scene. Apart from newsmen, police officers are also known to destroy the evidence.”

The first thing one notices about the edifice is its bleached-out appearance. But inside, the corridors smell of fresh paint. The staff recently moved back to Garden after spending eight months in Lines Area. The sparse security inside the forensic division’s offices, which Alam says received “multiple threats within the past two years”, is surprising.

At present, he is busy digitising and modernising the entire forensic system, criticised in the past for its lack of management. Alam says the foremost thing the department needs is to be taken seriously.

A police officer sitting nearby mentions an incident where the department received a gun from a Station House Officer of a police station. One of the technicians carried out a ‘unique signature analysis’ on the weapon — only to find it was a toy.

Clarifying, Alam says: “Such incidents are taken care of with a harsh warning to the commanding officer.”

He speaks about the low conviction rate in the city (three per cent) and the continuing “penal culture where circumstantial evidence is not considered much”.

“The world over,” he says, “forensics is considered an integral part of investigation but we still rely on eyewitnesses who don’t show up for their own reasons.”

Built in 1983, the building was previously known as the Criminalistic Division and had a separate department for collecting forensic evidence. It was renamed forensic division in 2009, the idea being to merge chemical examination, DNA and pathology. The total number of staff at the department is 117, including the two sub-units in Hyderabad and Larkana.

The building is not specifically designed to be a forensic lab, says Alam while giving me a tour of the long but narrow corridors and small brightly-lit rooms. “We had to put in a lot of efforts to introduce the sort of software we wanted. The structure needs a serious uplift. Plus, there’s the threat of an attack. We need enough space to move around comfortably.”

Apart from the Sindh government, international donors such as the United States, Australia and Canada helped give the department a jumpstart.

It was former IG Mushtaq Shah who introduced a plan in February 2012 to upgrade the department. It has various modern technologies including software that can put together data of two million fingerprints, get the unique signature of a weapon, and collect deleted data from an email account, mobile phone or SIM card. But what it lacks is a database putting together criminal records such as mugshots and DNA samples.

The latter are still sent to Islamabad and Lahore which have well-equipped forensic departments, Alam says. “The chain of custody of the evidence is, however, compromised at times, which is aggravating.”

Another senior official requesting anonymity said even the recovery of a National Identity Card from a crime scene is not too helpful, as the police need the “family tree” of the criminal to investigate further leads. “For that we are in touch with Nadra. But it’s a tussle. It is a similar fight we had with cellular companies over giving us the authorisation to review phone records. We took them to court, let’s see what happens in this case,” he says.

With software for collecting fingerprints, the department is still waiting for a source code. Though the Memorandum of Understanding signed with the donor agency mentions it, the department is still waiting. Similarly, another MoU signed by the forensics department and a donor agency agreed upon providing a DNA-testing device but that hasn’t materialised either.

Meanwhile, Karachi police chief Shahid Hayat says that there’s still no sensitivity regarding what needs to be collected from a crime scene. “We are still waiting for the DNA lab to be put up by the end of this month. The tasks are many ahead of us and crime is not going to stop until we get these things done. But I see improvement. We waited this far, let’s see…” he says, trailing off.