Parents suspected of slaying kids

Bahawalnagar police arrest mother of murdered boy, girl

BAHAWALNAGAR:

An eight-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother were strangled to death in Azeem Town on Saturday.

Area police said the deceased Khadija and Ahmed Yar had been killed at their home.

Police officials told The Express Tribune that they suspected that the parents of the children had murdered them.

A forensic team collected evidence from the crime scene.

Faqirwali Police Station SHO Faraz Ahmad Wattoo said the father of the children, Nadeem, had gone missing after fleeing from the house.

He said the investigators suspected on the basis of their initial findings that the children’s father and mother had murdered them.

The mother of the deceased children was arrested.

The police said the motive behind the double murder was unclear. They said a police team had been formed to arrest Nadeem.

The bodies of the children were shifted to a local hospital, while investigations into the incident were under way, local police officials said.

On June 3, police in Lahore apprehended a grandfather, who  had kidnapped and murdered his six-year-old grandson in a plot to marry his daughter-in-law.

Police said the suspect, Nazir Ahmed, wished to marry his son’s wife. The culprit kidnapped his own grandson, six-year-old Ghulam Mustafa, and blackmailed the child’s father into divorcing his wife so he could marry her. In case of refusal, the suspect threatened to murder Mustafa.

When the suspect failed to achieve his desired outcome, he brutally killed his grandson and disposed of the body near a drain. The culprit managed to flee following the murder. However, police said that the suspect was eventually apprehended with the aid of modern technology.

On March 1 in Daska, 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. 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.

Three siblings die in accident

In another incident, three teenage siblings were killed when a trailer truck overran their motorcycle in Bahawalnagar.

The victims, 18-year-old Rameza Alam, her 16-year-old sister Ramsha and 14-year old brother Abdullah, were returning home after attending a summer camp at a college when their motorcycle was hit by the speeding trailer. All of them were killed on the spot.

Upon receiving information about the accident, Chishtian police arrived at the spot and shifted the bodies to the Tehsil hospital.

Police officials said the deceased students were children of Basharat Ali, a farmland owner of Chak 110 Fateh in Chishtian.

The police impounded the trailer involved in the accident and initiated a search for the driver who had fled the scene.

Witnesses confirmed that the boy driving the motorcycle was underage.

Commenting on the accident, a local resident, Muhammad Intezar, said children driving motorcycles and rickshaws had become a common sight in every neighbourhood and bazaar of Bahawalnagar, resulting in daily accidents.

A traffic official said while speaking to The Express Tribune that the authorities had only achieved limited success in deterring children from driving because when the underage drivers were apprehended, they were subsequently released after obtaining a surety from their parents.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2023.