8 members of family slaughtered in Lahore

Police suspected the family were drugged at dinner before they went to bed.

LAHORE:

Eight members of a family were bludgeoned to death in their home in the Johar Town neighbourhood of the provincial capital on Tuesday. Two brothers and their spouses and their three children, as well as their unmarried sibling, were all killed with a blunt object in their sleep some time Monday night, police said.

The grisly mass murder was discovered when a relative of the family visited the house in E-Block, Johar Town, to deliver a wedding invitation, according to the police. The relative — a nephew of the slain men — reported to the police that he rang the doorbell several times, but no one responded. Surprisingly, when he pushed the door, he found it open.

“When I got in, I found my maternal uncles Zahid, Shahid, Nazeer, their wives Farzana and Naseem and three children, Afaq, Amina and Areeba, dead,” he told the police.

Subsequently, a police contingent, led by CCPO Chaudhry Shafique Gujjar, rushed to the spot. A Punjab Forensic Science Agency (PFSA) team also reached the spot to collect evidence from the crime scene.

The police found three bodies, those of Zahid, 45, his wife Naseem, 38, and their daughter Amina, 6, from a room on the ground floor of the double-storey house. Another four bodies — those of Shahid, 40, his wife Farzana, 35, and their children Areeba, 7, and Afaq, 14 — were found from a room on the first floor while the body of the eldest brother Nazeer, 50, was found from a third room. The bodies were shifted to the Jinnah hospital morgue in Edhi ambulances amid heart-rending scenes.

Nazeer, a stomach cancer patient, was in Lahore for treatment and was staying at his brothers’ house, the police said. Zahid was an English teacher by profession, Shahid was a contractor for the National Highway Authority while Nazeer was a chemical engineer and not married.

A senior police official told The Express Tribune that the victims were hit in the head with a hammer. He suspected the family were drugged at dinner before they went to bed. The police found the weapon and a bottle of chloroform from the house – which substantiates the police suspicion that the family was unconscious when they were killed.

The victims belonged to Jahanian, a town in Khanewal district. Another brother of the victims, Dr Naseer, who lives in DHA Lahore, told The Express Tribune that the family had run into huge debt due to the medical treatment of their brother, Nazeer.

SSP (Investigation) Chaudhry Abdur Rab said that they were investigating the murders from different angles. However, he suspected that someone from among the victims might have killed the family and then committed suicide.

SP CIA Umer Virk added that the police did not find any wound on the body of the eldest brother, Nazeer, while some sedatives and the murder weapon, hammer, were recovered from his room. Nazeer might have drugged the family and then smashed their heads with hammer before committing suicide using the sedatives, he said.

The police sent Nazeer’s fingerprints and those on the hammer and on the chloroform bottle to the PFSA. They said the FIR of the case would be registered after they receive results from the laboratory.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 19^th, 2014.