Police arrest man for killing wife in Rawalpindi

Husband, in-laws tortured Rabia to death, hanged her body to show it as a suicide

RAWALPINDI: A woman was brutally tortured to death by her husband and in-laws, who later hanged her body with her dupatta from a ceiling fan to make it look as if she committed suicide.

Naseerabad police on Saturday arrested a man, and also booked his mother and sister on the complaint of the victim’s mother that they had killed her and orchestrated it to look like suicide.

Fatimah, mother of the deceased Rabia, told Naseerabad police that her son-in-law, Rizwan Shah, tortured and killed Rabia with the assistance of his sister Sidran Bibi and mother Badran Bibi. Later, they tried to hide the murder behind the guise of suicide. Rabia had been married to Shah for 14 months and had a seven-month old child.

According to police investigators, Shah had informed the local precinct that his wife has committed suicide. When the police team reached the crime scene they saw a woman’s body hanging by a dupatta from a ceiling fan.



“While retrieving the body we noticed a cut on the victim’s wrist and also recovered a blade from the crime scene,” a police official said.

The police arrested Shah; however they were waiting for the post-mortem report.

The victim’s mother in her report had accused Shah of regularly beating her daughter and finally taking her life. She told the police that her son-in-law was a drug-addict and would regularly beat her daughter.

Moreover, in another incident Hamza Ahmed told Rata Amral police that his three-year-old daughter went missing, and later he discovered her corpse behind a refrigerator with shoelaces tied around her neck. He went on to add that he believed that his daughter had been brutally murdered by one of their relative.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 3^rd, 2019.