Man kills family, himself, in DHA Phase IV

Durrani claimed life was tough and there was too much competition.

KARACHI:

A man who reportedly killed his family of four on Tuesday morning wrote an email to his extended family hinting that he had had enough with life.

The 50-year-old chief finance officer of a Sanghar sugar mill, Abdul Jawwad Durrani, his wife and three children - 11-year-old Rehan, nine-year old Rameen and four-year-old Arif - were found dead inside their house near Yasrab Imambargah in DHA Phase IV. The investigators have speculated that Durrani shot himself after he killed the rest of the family while they were sleeping.

Durrani also emailed some of his relatives and friends at 5am when he said that, “We are mere mortals - everything will end one day,” read the email as quoted by some of his relatives and the police. He further said that there is no point in living. “There is too much competition in this world. I have worked so hard all my life and my children will be forced to do the same, but I don’t want them to. People are already killing each other. We have to die eventually, whether today or tomorrow.”

When his friends and relatives received this email, they tried to contact him. “The email was very shocking,” said Durrani’s brother-in-law Anis. “We were even more tensed when his phone was also not responding and the bungalow was locked from the inside.”

This suspicious behaviour forced them to call the police, who broke the front door and found Durrani and his wife lying in their bedroom while the children were in their room. The investigators said that a single weapon - most likely a 9mm pistol - was used in the killing and has been found.



The doctors at Jinnah hospital said that the murder took place around 6am, which means that Durrani may have shot them shortly after sending that email. The bodies of his wife, Wajiha, and the three children were taken to the hospital for post-mortem. “Apparently, all the victims were shot,” said a doctor. “We have taken samples to verify if they were poisoned before being shot.”

The family members were shot once in the head while they were sleeping. “Then he put the pistol inside his mouth and committed suicide,” said SSP Aftab. “The wife may have been shot first and then the children. The bodies and the crime scene suggest that there was no resistance.” Some of the neighbours said they did not hear anything while others insisted they did.

The police have, however, ruled out the possibility of a heist as all the valuables inside the house were in place and nothing was missing. They have also not filed an FIR yet. The security cameras installed at the entrance and inside the bungalow also suggest that no one else entered or escaped the bungalow. According to the police, Durrani had a driver but he usually reported at the house after 9 in the morning.

The family was settled in Dubai and came to Karachi on Sunday. “Everything was alright until Monday evening because the whole family attended a wedding then,” said one of the relatives. “We don’t think they had any personal enmity or were facing any threats. But Durrani seemed to be in a strange mindset for sometime.”

A police officer said that his email also suggested that Durrani was feeling disheartened for the past three years. “What is strange is that the issues he mentioned in the email, such as competition, trouble those facing financial hardships and he was not poor,” he said.

The police have located all the five bullets shot. “We will determine with the help of finger prints, weapons and bullet shells whether or not the same weapon was used and if Durrani fired it,” said a forensic expert.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2013.