Suicidal man kills his children
A man allegedly hurled his two boys into a canal near the Upper Chenab Bridge and then he himself jumped into it.
The bodies of Abdul Rauf, 38, and his seven-year-old son, Dawood, were fished out from the canal.
However, no trace of Rauf’s other son, nine-year-old Yahya, could be found.
Rescue 1122 staff were searching for Yahya. The rescue workers appeared to be harbouring no hope of the child’s being found alive.
Abdul Rauf had been married for 12 years, but it was not a happy marriage.
The couple had had no love lost for each other. Things ultimately came to such a pass that Rauf’s wife walked out on his husband and went to her father’s house.
She wanted to take the children along, but Abdul Rauf had put his foot down. So the children were made to stay with Rauf.
Had Rauf’s wife known about the state of her husband’s mental health things might have been different, and the little children would have escaped being killed by their own father.
The witnesses who had had the misfortune to see the gory event said that they could not have anticipated two children who had been playing with their toy cars on the bank of the canal would be so mercilessly thrown into the canal with the blink of an eye.
A witness, Asif, said that the children had been in their school uniforms.
To save them, a boy had jumped into the canal and managed to pull Dawood out of the canal. The child was breathing, and a motorcyclist rushed him to the nearest hospital, but he could not survive.
Cases in which multiple members of the same family committed suicide or were killed by their own family have also been reported earlier in the province.
In June 2020, a mother of seven children had allegedly ended her life by consuming poisonous pills along with her two daughters over a domestic dispute in Mohalla Selwan of Mianwali.
Muhammad Tahir Qureshi and his wife had had a dispute over marriage proposals for their daughters. The husband allegedly pressured his daughters into accepting the marriage proposals as per his wishes, while the wife and daughters did not agree to the proposals.
As a result of the dispute, Tahir’s wife and daughters, 12-year-old Anza and 11-year-old Asma, had allegedly swallowed poisonous substance.
The woman and her daughters had been shifted to a rural health centre from where the doctors referred them to the Mianwali DHQ Hospital. However, neither the woman nor her daughters could survive.
In the same year, a woman reportedly poisoned herself and four other members of her family due to financial problems in Okara.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 1st, 2023.