ISLAMABAD: An Islamabad district court on Saturday issued arrest warrants for senior journalist, Ayaz Amir, and his wife, in connection with the murder of their daughter-in-law at a farmhouse in the federal capital a day earlier.
Amir's son, Shahnawaz, is accused of killing his Canadian national wife, Sara Inam, with a dumbbell at a farmhouse in Chak Shahzad, a suburb of Islamabad that falls in the jurisdiction of Shahzad Town police station. The incident has brought back painful and disturbing memories of the murder of Noor Mukadam last year, which drew national outrage over femicides in the South Asian nation.
The police arrested Shahnawaz from the crime scene on Friday and booked him under Section 302 (punishment for murder) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) on the complaint of Shahzad Town station house officer (SHO) Nawazish Ali Khan.
On Saturday, the police presented the accused before District and Sessions Judge Mubashir Hassan Chishti and sought his 10-day physical remand. But the judge granted only two-day remand of the accused.
The police also requested the court for issuance of arrest warrants for the suspect’s parents, Amir and Samina Shah, to record their statements, which was granted.
The suspect’s mother on Friday called the police and informed that her son had murdered his wife “with a dumbbell,” according to the first information report (FIR), a copy of which is available with Arab News.
“My son is present at home and has hidden the body here,” Shah had informed the police.
The police said the suspect had locked himself in a room after seeing a police team at their residence. They said they found blood stains on the suspect's hands and clothes when they broke into the room.
“He informed the police that he had repeatedly hit his wife with a dumbbell during an argument and then hid her body in the washroom’s bathtub,” the FIR read.
The suspect had hidden the murder weapon under a sofa in his bedroom, according to the FIR. The investigators found blood and hair on the dumbbell upon initially examining it and later dispatched it for forensics.
Inam, a Canadian national, got married to Shahnawaz three months ago in Chakwal, the hometown of the accused. It is believed the couple knew each other before marriage and the marriage was of their own choice, not arranged by their families, as is common in Pakistan.
The woman was employed in Abu Dhabi and returned to Pakistan on Wednesday.
The victim’s family in Canada has not yet contacted the police for the registration of a case.
As the news of the murder flashed on television screens across Pakistan, many remembered Mukadam who was found beheaded in an upscale Islamabad neighborhood in July 2020.
In March this year, a Pakistani court sentenced to death Pakistani-American Zahir Jaffer, a childhood friend of Mukadam, for beheading her and to 25 years imprisonment with a fine of Rs200,000 for rape, ten years in jail with a Rs100,000 fine for abduction and a one-year jail term for keeping Mukadam in illegal confinement.
Mukadam and Jaffer were widely believed to have been in a relationship, which they had broken off a few months before her murder.
Hundreds of women are killed in Pakistan every year, with thousands more suffering brutal violence. But few cases receive sustained media attention, and only a small fraction of perpetrators are ever punished or convicted by courts.
But Mukadam’s shocking murder, involving members of the privileged elite of the Pakistani society, triggered an explosive reaction from women’s rights activists reckoning with pervasive violence. It also increased pressure for a swift conclusion of the trial in a country known to have a sluggish justice system and where cases typically drag on for years.
