Woman ‘hacks father to death’

GUJRAT:

A 70-year-old man was axed to death while he had been asleep in Baharwala village of the district.

The account of the incident given by the family members of the slain man is, to say the least, quiet murky.

The plaintiff in the case is the slain man’s stepson and the person the plaintiff has accused of killing his stepfather is his half-sister, who happened to be a differently-abled person undergoing psychiatric treatment.

The most intriguing part involving the episode is the fact that the plaintiff buried his stepfather without informing the police about the incident.

When word started going round the village about the incident, the police sprang into action and went to the house of the deceased to see his relatives and question them about what had transpired.

Zafar Iqbal, the stepson of the deceased, told the police that his half-sister, Nabila Kausar, the accused in the case, had been suffering from some mental disorder for which she was undergoing treatment.

Zafar Iqbal alleged that Nabila Kausar axed her father Arif to death while he had been asleep on April 22 and started shouting, “I have killed Baba”.

Zafar Iqbal told the police that Nabila’s shouting woke the rest of the family members up who came out of their rooms and headed for Arif’s room where they found him lying in a pool of blood.

“We considered it an accident and buried our father,” said Zafar Iqbal.

Meanwhile, police said they had registered a case. They said that they were going to exhume the body and investigate into the matter to get to the bottom of it.

Currently, no one was arrested.

Last month, a 55-year-old woman and her 24-year-old adopted daughter had been strangled at night while they had been asleep, police said.

They had said that the 24-year-old deceased had married one Abu Sufyan five years ago against the wishes of her maternal uncles.

Police had said that the other deceased, Rashidan Bibi, 55, a working woman, had been a widow who had had no children of her own so she had adopted Rabia Bibi, who was a daughter of one of Rashidan’s relatives.

Rashidan Bibi had also adopted a boy who had now become a grown up man with a wife. Rashidan Bibi had been living with her adopted son and his wife.

Rabia, too, had been living a happily married life with her husband and two children in her husband’s house.

They said that Rabia’s uncle, Mashooq Ali alias Mastu, had allegedly been pressuring his niece to end her marriage, but Rabia had stood her grounds and refused to oblige her uncle.

On March 14, Rashidan Bibi’s adopted son, along with his wife, went to visit his in-laws and decided to spend the night there.

Being mindful of not leaving her mother alone at the house for the night, Rashidan Bibi’s son requested Rabia to go to their house to give company to their mother and spend the night with her.

Police said that the two women had been asleep at their home in Iqbal Nagar when suspect Mashooq Ali alias Mastu, along with his accomplices, allegedly sneaked into their home, strangled the women and escaped.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 27^th, 2023.