The son of late Saira Naseer, a provincial women's wing
leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F), on Thursday,
along with his wife, confessed to killing his mother on the pretext of
'honour'.
Both the son, Fahad Ali, and his wife, Sadaf Sarhandi, are currently in police custody.
Earlier this month, police had found Naseer's charred remains
in her burnt car. She had been identified by her daughters by the rings
removed from the car. The police believe that she had been murdered
before being set alight.
Speaking at a crowded press conference in Hyderabad, the couple said they killed the PML-F activist because of her "character".
Fahad
was arrested on Wednesday night after being summoned to Senior
Superintendent of Police (SSP) Pir Mohammad Shah's house along with his
father, Zaheer and stepsisters, Hina and Sana. He was separated and
taken into custody while his family members were allowed to go.
“I
spoke to Fahad Ali and confronted with him with the evidence which we
had gathered so far and he subsequently confessed to the murder. Then he
recounted how it happened around midnight on December 6-7,” said SSP
Shah.
The SSP said that he had personally supervised
the investigation of the case, during which he analysed "thousands of
pages" of cellphone records and studied the movements of an unspecified
vehicle. He claimed that one detail in particular had helped him resolve
the mystery surrounding the murder.
Explaining, SSP Shah
said that the clue was the location of Fahad's mobile phone at his
mother's Defence Phase-II residence at the time he received two messages
from his father, Zaheer, who himself had been present in Latifabad at
the time. Secondly, he said, the movement of Sadaf’s footprints in
Naseer's house that night had been "abnormal", identifying which helped
greatly in the investigation.
The SSP said police had
also visited the crime scene, where eyewitnesses had told them they had
seen a young man and a woman near a burnt car.
“Both the man and the woman, who were sweating profusely on a cold night, had taken water from a nearby dhaba [roadside restaurant] and then consumed more water from another dhaba,” the SSP said.
Shah
pointed out that the location of Fahad’s mobile belied his oft-repeated
alibi: that he had left his car at his mother's house around 4pm on
December 6 and returned at 9pm again to get some money, as he was to
travel to Karachi early morning on December 7.
In fact,
the couple had been living at Naseer's house since November 20 after
reconciling with the mother, who had initially objected to Fahad’s
marriage with Sadaf, he said.
“On Wednesday night, when I
showed Fahad his mobile phone’s location in the Defence area where he
received two messages at 11:30pm and 11:36pm, he [Fahad] started to
sweat, because he had initially insisted that he was at his flat in
Latifabad [at the time of the murder]. He had claimed he had slept early
that night because he was to leave for Karachi on Dec 7, and had
therefore replied to those messages at 4:30am," the police officer said.
"In order to reconstruct the crime scene, we also took
him [Fahad] to the restaurant where he and his wife had drunk water,” he
said.
“He initially said he did this on the pretext of
honour, and then said he had hit her with a blunt object once [without
intent to kill], but it proved fatal for the victim as she fell from the
impact,” the SSP said.
He said that gasoline available
in the house where the murder took place had been used by Fahad to torch
the car after shifting his mother's body into it and taking it to a
desolated place in the Husri area.
“I am confessing it
before police that we have done it,” Fahad said at the press conference.
His wife, Sadaf, meanwhile said that they had torched the car only to
frame it as an accident, but hadn't realised that the fire would be that
massive.
“Fahad did it [killed Naseer] in a fit of
anger after seeing his mother’s pictures and videos. He had given up the
company of his friends because of his mother’s character, as his
friends used to say different things," his wife said.
She
alleged that Naseer used to say that she was an independent person and
would spend her life whatever way she deemed fit, which irked her son.
"Fahad avoided [the situation] on many occasions, but for how long can it be avoided," she said.
