Double murder: Parents handed over to police for two days

Police say the mother may have a psychological disorder.

LAHORE:

A court on Thursday handed over a man and his wife, arrested for allegedly killing their two children in Johar Town On Wednesday, to the police for two days. 

The police said while the mother had confessed to the killings shortly after their arrest, they were considering the possibility that she was suffering from a psychological disorder.

A police official close to the investigation told The Express Tribune that the woman had been talking to herself in the lock up, asking her inmates at times to keep quiet so her children may sleep peacefully.

Police said they would likely seek a psychiatrist’s opinion on Bisma Bibi’s condition. The woman had confessed to killing her eight-month-old son and two-year-old daughter on Wednesday for being unable to feed them. She had said she strangled her son and drowned the girl.



The couple were produced before a judicial magistrate on Thursday. Noticing an injury on Bisma’s nose, the magistrate asked her what had caused it. She said her father and brothers had beaten her up after they found out that she had killed her children.

The magistrate handed her and her husband, arrested on charge of abetment, to the police for two days.

Talking to The Express Tribune, the police officer, wishing not to be named since he was part of the investigation, also said that the woman would laugh or cry for hours in the lockup.

She said some months after her marriage she discovered that her in-laws had been residents of the red light area, something, she said, they had concealed from her.

Station House Officer Bushra Azizi of the Racecourse women police station told The Express Tribune that Bisma Bibi accused her in-laws of trying four year ago to send her to Dubai with ‘a cultural delegation’ which she said was a euphemism for prostitution. She said she had refused to go.

This, she told police, had led to several arguments between them, and she had moved to her parents’ house. However, she had returned to her husband home later. She told police that her husband did not want to work and had quarrelled with her every time she had asked him to look for a job.

Azizi quoted her as saying that her husband and in-laws had proposed an abortion when she was four-month pregnant with her son. She said she had again moved to her parents’ house and returned after the birth.

Talking to reporters outside the court room, her husband Sunny said that his wife is a ‘psychopath’. He said he had not killed the children.

His brother, Abuzar Suleman, also the complainant in the case, too, said that his brother was innocent. He said he had seen Bisma’s father Haji Tahir visit the house a few hours before the incident, and suggested that he may have been involved in the murders. He said Tahir had taken the children’s bodies after the post-mortem examination and Sunny’s family were not allowed to see them.

He said several people in Bisma’s family had psychological problems. He said her mother and a maternal uncle had committed suicide. Her father, he said, was an epileptic. Her two aunts had once shaved each other’s heads following a quarrel. He said Bisma’s paternal aunt was accused of her (Bisma’s) mother’s murder, and had been declared proclaimed offender by a court.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 7^th, 2014.