Sobra City victims were tortured

Police include murder charge as a case was filed against woman’s husband

HARIPUR:

A woman and three children, whose charred bodies had been recovered from the dying embers of a burnt house in the Ghazi area of Haripur in late August, had been brutally tortured to death while the inferno was staged to cover up the crime.

Thereafter, the police have decided to include sections related to pre-meditated murder in the first information report on the case while a relative of the woman killed has nominated her husband, who survived, as the prime suspect.

This was disclosed by police sources while quoting a post-mortem report of the victims.

Officials said that on August 29, police and rescue workers had been called to a house fire in Sobra City, one of the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) colonies for its workers in the Ghazi area of Haripur. After hectic efforts, the firefighters managed to put the blaze out, but not before the fire had consumed the entire house. While rummaging through its ashes, rescue workers discovered the bodies of a woman Nagina Shahzad and her two children Hamdan and Hooria and their nephew Ayan.

Murdered housemaid’s torture was filmed

Initially, rescue workers believed that a short circuit had caused the fire. However, an investigation by Wapda showed that the cause of the fire was not a short circuit. The father of the children, Sardar Shahzad, then suspected foul play and had approached the local court to exhume the bodies and conduct an autopsy.

Officials said that according to the post-mortem report, the entire incident had been carefully planned.

They added that the bodies showed that the bones in the hands and feet of the children had been broken while their bodies carried other torture marks. The fire was a case of arson as the blaze was used to help cover up the crime as an accident.

While sections for murder have been included in the FIR, police suspect that some local policemen may have also played a part in covering up the matter by taking Rs400,000 as a bribe. Taking notice o this, the Haripur district police officer had suspended the station house officer and other officers of the relevant precinct.

Meanwhile, Sardar Ilyas, who was Nagina’s brother-in-law and whose child had died in the fire, has filed a case nominating Shahzad as the culprit.

Shahzad was subsequently arrested along with some of his companions.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 23^rd, 2020.