New twist: Child murder probe gets murkier

Police say father refuses to confess to murder of 8-month-old Mustafa.

LAHORE: While the police were quick to make an arrest in connection with the death of eight-month-old child Mustafa allegedly murdered on Saturday evening by his father, details emerging from overnight interrogation suggest the deceased infant’s mother is also a suspect.

Kot Lakhpat’s SHO Atif Meraj said the father Murtaza was interrogated by the police but would not confess to killing his son. The SHO said Murtaza stated during interrogation that he worked as a guard at a local bank in the night shift. His wife, Maafia, worked as a maid at different houses in the locality during the day time while he would take care of his son, he said.

“If the woman suspected that I would kill the boy, then why would she leave the child with me every day?” he asked.

The preliminary report shows a slight tilt in favour of the accused, as an investigation officer told The Express Tribune that Murtaza is Maafia’s fourth husband and that she has another son, five-year-old Nayyar, from a previous marriage. Murtaza told the authorities that Nayyar would often pick up the infant and drop him on the floor, suggesting that this may have caused the baby’s death.

Meraj said the accused earlier told police that he did not kill his son but that the child accidentally fell from his hands onto the floor while he was giving him a bath. In his first statement, he claimed that his child accidentally fell from a balcony on the first floor of the house to the ground floor.

The police official said initial findings of the autopsy conclude that the baby was blood deficient and a probable cause of death might be that his body was starved of oxygen when he was dropped and tried to cry. The investigation wing officer at the police station said that there was a bruise on the child’s nose and mouth which may have appeared when he fell face-down on the floor.

The SHO said Nayyar’s statement might change the angle of the story told by his  mother, suggesting that the woman might have hatched this plan to marry for the fifth time.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 21^st, 2014.