November 30, 2003	Sunday	Shawwal 5, 1424

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MULTAN, Nov 29: Police have not yet produced the father of Afsheen Mussarrat before a duty magistrate to bring his ‘arrest’ on record.

Mussarrat Husain Sahu had courted arrest on Eid day following the publication of a news item based on autopsy report that Afsheen had died an unnatural death. The report confirmed that she had been tortured and strangled.

Afsheen died on Nov 10 last at her father’s house in Gulshan-i-Mehar Colony in Multan. Her family buried her the next day in ancestral village Marri Sahu in Kabirwala tehsil in Khanewal district, some 50 kilometres from here, declaring her death as natural.

However, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s Multan Task Force coordinator Advocate Rashid Rehman filed an application with the Gulgashat police station to draw the attention of the law enforcers towards the mysterious circumstances that led to Afsheen’s death and feared that she might have been killed for the sake of honour.

A computer science graduate, Afsheen was married to her paternal cousin Nauman on Sept 12 last against her will. She wanted to marry her maternal cousin and class fellow Hassan Mustafa.

It is said that Afsheen and Hassan had solemnized a secret nikkah even before her ‘forced’ marriage with Nauman.

On Nov 1 last, Afsheen eloped with Hassan and took refuge in Rawalpindi at the house of a family acquaintance. However, her father and other male family members managed to bring her back on Nov 8 and she died two days afterwards.

The Multan police initially did not give the matter much importance. According to an HRCP report, the police rather discouraged rights activists arguing that under the Qisas and Diyat laws action in such cases without the consent of heirs was not possible.

The police had to take up the matter seriously on Saturday last when President Gen Pervez Musharraf condemned atrocities against women and ordered a thorough inquiry into the ‘mystery’ death of Afsheen Mussarrat.

A medical board comprising four doctors conducted autopsy on the body of Afsheen after 14 days of her death and sent samples to the chemical examiner to ascertain the exact cause of her death. In its initial report, the board confirmed that Afsheen’s death was unnatural.

Sources in the police department said that prime suspects in the Afsheen case were her father Mussarrat, grandfather Allah Ditta and unidentified number of male relatives. They said though Mussarrat Husain had ‘confessed’ to the murder but the police did not believe him that he was the lone killer. They said more than two people had tortured the deceased and the police were trying to extract their names from Mussarrat during interrogation before producing him in the court.

Meanwhile, scores of rights activists staged a protest rally organized by the Awaz Foundation here on Saturday in front of the local press club to condemn killings in the name of honour.