The perfect crime?: Body dumped in DHA Ph VIII bushes was burnt with acid, raped

Only one police mobile unit mans the vast area, detectives usually dismiss such victims as ‘call girls’.

KARACHI:

Until someone comes forward to identify the 20-something woman whose body was found in the bushes in DHA Phase VIII, the police are unlikely to be able to crack the case.

She bore torture marks, revealed a sub-inspector, who is also the inquiry officer in the case. “Although the medico-legal officer will give his official report from Jinnah hospital, you could clearly see that acid was thrown on the body; the shoulders and neck were badly burnt,” he said, adding that her dupatta was missing.

He said that the woman must have been in her late 20s and the doctor who conducted the post mortem said that she was also raped. He spoke on condition of anonymity as he is not allowed to speak to the media without the permission of his superiors.

Jinnah’s MLO Dilip Khatri told The Express Tribune that the chemical examination report will take a few more days.

This is the second such case in just a week. On July 30, the week-old decomposed body of an O-Level student, Ahmed Macdi, was found from the same area. He was allegedly murdered by one of his classmates.

Darakhshan SHO Nasrullah said that even though he has posted a mobile unit in the area, Defence Phase VIII is so vast that this is not enough. He said he was helpless when it came to this woman’s mysterious murder as she remains unidentified. “You tell me how can I move ahead with the case if I don’t know who the woman was,” he said.

When DIG South Commander Shaukat was asked why the police’s record has been so dismal in cracking such cases, he admitted that investigations remain under par. But he insisted that this is not necessarily due to incompetence. “When one recovers a body from the sea or from a plot in an empty area, the murderer hardly leaves any clues behind,” he said. Also, usually in such cases the murders take place in another part of the city and the body is dumped in another. This helps the murderer buy some time since they exploit the inherent weaknesses in the police system in coordinating cases with other police stations.

He said it was true that by default some investigators describe such victims as ‘call girls’ without even making the effort to find out who exactly the victim was. But he denied that such cases are not taken seriously. “Inquiry teams are formed and we will even form one in this case,” he said.

Usually the bodies that are dumped in the city are males, but last year there were more than 25 women who met the same fate, said the Edhi Foundation’s Anwar Kazmi. Already this year there have been more than a dozen such cases. “The victims are mostly young girls,” he said, adding that the foundation picked up two bodies from Sohrab Goth and Surjani Town recently, which the police claimed were honour killing cases.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 3^rd, 2011.