Spain detains Pakistani over murder

The Pakistani man is accused of stabbing a man to death in Indonesia and then chopping his body into pieces.

MADRID: Spanish police detained a Pakistani man accused of stabbing a man to death in Indonesia and then chopping his body into pieces, the Spanish interior ministry said on Thursday.

Police arrested the 32-year-old, identified only by his initials IFS, as he was about to enter a metro station in central Madrid, it said in a statement. Indonesian authorities had issued an international arrest warrant for him following a kidnap-murder in the town of Karawang, about 60 kilometres from Jakarta, in June 2010.

The man and his wife are accused of contacting the victim with the pretext of hiring him to create a web page, and then kidnapping him for ransom, the interior ministry said.

“The crime culminated in a lethal knife stabbing and then dismemberment, with different parts of the body placed in bags and suitcases within refrigerators and then dispersed around Karawang,” the ministry said.

The woman was arrested in Indonesia but her husband fled to Spain, where he had lived before, at the end of September.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 26^th, 2010.