Easy money: Crime don’t pay

Brothers arrested for murder to be presented in court.

RAWALPINDI: The two suspects charged with the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Adil Gulzar will be presented before court on Monday.

On December 10, Abdullah Qureshi and Ahmed Qureshi kidnapped Adil, their neighbour. Within an hour they had choked him to death, according to the police. They then called up his family, making a ransom demand of Rs5 million. Police was informed and the subsequent tracing of the call led them to Abdullah, who was arrested on Thursday. During interrogation, he told police that Adil was already dead. He also told police that they had dumped his body in Korang Nullah.

Ahmed Qureshi, the second suspect and elder brother of Abdullah, was arrested late on Thursday night through Abdullah’s information.

Both the suspects confessed to their crime and the police said they have a strong case against them.

“They had narrated the whole story in their statement, which was further established after the recovery of the body,” the investigation officer told The Express Tribune. He added that said the suspects were traced with the help of the cell phone they used for the ransom demand.

A police official said, “Now we are trying to establish if they were following someone’s orders or if they did it of their own volition.”

Abdullah, the younger of the two, might be below 18 years of age and as such will be tried as a juvenile. Police, however, are not yet sure of the age of the two suspects.

“We have not yet checked their identity cards but both of them are well-built and healthy. They had muscular bodies, bigger than an ordinary healthy person. Abdullah seems like capable of breaking a neck with bare hands,” said the investigation officer.

Abdullah revealed during the investigations that they killed Adil because they could not find a place to keep him. “They feared that he would recognise them once he was released and they could not take such a risk,” the investigation officer said.

Therefore, after much thought and discussion they suffocated him to death and packed his body in a bag, filled it with heavy stones and dropped it in Korang Nullah, from where they thought it would never be recovered, the officer added.

Meanwhile Adil’s family was busy arranging for the money. “After arranging the money, we had asked them to let us speak to our child and we will deliver the money to them,” said Mukhtar Ahmed, Adil’s paternal uncle.

But they never got to hear their child’s voice. “Now the police say our child was killed within an hour of the kidnapping.”

During the whole ordeal, the two brothers visited Adil’s house several times to console the family.  “They used to come every two hours and ask about the boy and pray for his early recovery,” the uncle recalled.

Police said the two brothers were trying to make “easy money”. They first planned to commit a robbery but dropped the idea since they thought it was too risky, an investigation officer told The Express Tribune. They eventually settled on kidnapping Adil, because they knew his family well and thought that his Saudi Arabia-based father would be able to pay the ransom amount easily.

Ahmed, the uncle, said, “Both of them were very good friends of my nephew. They had grown up playing together in the streets.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2010.