Mystery unveiled: Dirty video leads to deadly ending

Hostel warden, accomplice confess to nurse’s murder; motive was recovery of a video.

GILGIT:

The Gilgit police on Monday said that a hostel warden and her accomplice, who had been arrested earlier, have confessed to raping and killing a nurse.

The body of Shabana Akhtar, a nurse hailing from Astore Valley, was found hanging from a ceiling fan in her room at Nursing Hostel in Gilgit a few months back.

The police initially believed that the nurse had committed suicide. However, during investigations they found out that she had been murdered, upon which the police arrested Jamila, the warden of the hostel, and her accomplice Nadeem Ahmed on murder charges.

“Both of them confessed that they killed Shabana and hanged her body to stage a suicide,” said an investigating officer.

Interestingly, the autopsy conducted on the body by local doctors confirmed that she had committed suicide. However, after the confession from Jamila and Ahmed, the body is being re-examined by doctors outside Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B).

Shabana’s family had earlier rejected the postmortem report, terming it as a fake, but it was only after an appeal to the Chief Justice of the G-B Supreme Appellate Court that the case was reinvestigated.

According to sources, Jamila confessed to plotting Shabana’s murder after she got hold of a ‘compromising’ video clip from the former’s personal life. She said she intoxicated Shabana before Ahmed raped her.

The police have decided not to reexamine the body after the confession.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 2^nd, 2011.