Lost in oblivion: Forgotten for months, foreigner’s murder re-examined

The body was buried last year, before the autopsy report was released.

ISLAMABAD:

The Sihala police waited five months before registering a case for the murder of a girl of African descent.

The girl’s body was found from behind the building of a gas station in Sihala in the outskirts of the city in September last year. Police officials said she appeared to be in her late teens and her complexion and features suggested that she was from Africa. “Most probably she was from Nigeria,” said a police official.

But they never tried to trace her family. She was buried and forgotten. It was only a couple of days ago that the police station officials realised they never registered a case.

A police official said the body was taken to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. After the autopsy, it remained in the mortuary for a day or two before the police decided to bury it.

The police did not publish her details in the press, which might have helped locate her family. They did not even contact foreign missions in Islamabad.

The autopsy report was completed late in December last year. It confirmed that the girl was strangulated to death and the body was four to five days old at the time it was brought to the mortuary. There were no other signs of torture or beating on the body. Even after the report, the Sihala police took no action.

On February 28 this year, only after a senior official noticed this anomaly did they register the murder case. A police official said the case has been handed over to an investigator who will start investigations “soon”.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2012.