A ‘mangal sutra’, some miniature Hindu sculptures and two corpses

Woman and daughter shot dead in graveyard over possible property dispute near Larkana.

SUKKUR: One of the best ways to throw the police off the trail of a cold-blooded murder is to pass the victims off as Hindus. And indeed this is what the killers of a woman and her daughter did in a graveyard in Dhamra town near Larkana on the night of September 20 and 21.

One of the victims had a ‘mangal sutra’ around her neck, the type that Hindu women wear after they are married. In the purses next to the bodies the police discovered a number of Hindu miniature sculptures. The Larkana police sent the bodies for an autopsy to Chandka Medical College Hospital. According to the post-mortem report, both the women were shot from an approximate distance of one foot.

Initially, nobody was willing to identify or claim the bodies which is why the authorities decided to call Edhi to hand them over for burial. However, before the bodies could be transferred, Sikandar Junejo - who is the son of Pakistan Peoples Party Larkana taluka president Mazhar Junejo - went to the hospital and identified the victims as his aunt and cousin, sources said.

According to him, the elderly woman was his 60-year-old aunt Kulsoom - the second wife of former assistant commissioner Mohammad Saleh Qazi - and her 22-year-old daughter Saba Naz.

They were buried in their ancestral graveyard where their bodies were found - the graveyard they were visiting to pay respects to their father’s grave. Mazhar lodged an FIR against four unidentified people.

Sources claimed that the mother and daughter had been staying in a hotel in Larkana since September 7.  They left the hotel without informing the management on September 18. The women left unnoticed and without paying their hotel bill. Surprisingly, they left all their personal belongings behind - which police claim includes their clothes and property documentation for a huge tract of agricultural land worth millions of rupees near Dhamra town.

According to well-informed sources, Kulsoom was allegedly involved in a dispute with her brother Mazhar over the family property which could have been the reason behind the murders.

The hotel manager said when the women failed to show up for two days, he contacted them on their cell phone on the evening of September 20. Kulsoom picked up and assured him that they were arranging for the money and would clear the dues as soon as they could. But the manager never heard back from them. Dhamra Police SHO Manthar Umrani told The Express Tribune that: “It seems that somebody else was with the women on the night of the murder because women could not dare to go to the graveyard on their own and especially late at night.”

According to him, police have found two cell phones and a few packets of juice from the crime scene. SHO Umrani revealed that both the women were shot from a 9mm pistol. When asked where they could have been while they were away from the hotel from September 18 to 20, the officer said it was confusing but that they could have been with relatives.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 27^th,  2011.