Fact-check: Doctor who prepared Zille Shah’s postmortem has not been transferred
Dr Muhammad Owais Qureshi has not been transferred or suspended, confirm the hospital and the doctor himself
Updated Monday Mar 27 2023
Online posts, viewed thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, are falsely claiming that a doctor who prepared the postmortem report of Zille Shah, a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) supporter, has been suspended as he did not bow to official pressure when drafting the report, which showed unexplainable injuries on Shah’s body.
Claim
A verified Twitter account user wrote on March 9: “Owais Qureshi is the doctor who wrote the correct report of Zille Shah without taking pressure. He has been transferred…He deserves a red salute.”
The tweet has received over 4,400 retweets, 10,000 likes and 68,000 views, to date.
Similar claims were shared on Facebook.
On March 9, a Facebook account wrote that Owais Qureshi is the doctor who prepared Zille Shah’s report “without any pressure. He has been transferred.”
Fact
Geo Fact Check visited the General Hospital in Lahore, Punjab, to confirm the veracity of the claim. It found that Dr Muhammad Owais Qureshi, who is a medico-legal examiner at the General Hospital, had not been transferred or suspended. He continues to work at the Hospital.
This was confirmed by Dr Khalid Bin Aslam, the medical superintendent at the Hospital, to Geo Fact Check.
“These people [from the forensic department] do not come daily,” he said, “They have two or three duties per a week. He has not been transferred.”
Geo Fact Check also reached out to Dr Owais Qureshi himself. “I am still working at General Hospital,” he confirmed via WhatsApp, adding that he was not transferred.
Shah, a political supporter of the PTI, was arrested by the police for protesting on March 8 from Lahore. Police say they later dropped Shah off in another part of the city, where he died in a road accident.
Separately, the postmortem report, prepared by Dr Owais Qureshi on March 9, showed injuries in various parts of Shah’s body, which the doctors added “are consistent with massive blunt trauma.”
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