MULTAN, Dec 7: Local police on Sunday produced the father of slain Afsheen Mussarat before a duty magistrate and sought his seven-day physical remand.

Advocate Mussarat Hussain Sahu had confessed to the murder of his daughter while courting arrest on Nov 26 last but the local police were not admitting that he was in their custody. Earlier, another suspect in Afsheen Mussarat murder case secured pre-arrest bail from a local court.

Fazeel Raza Sahu, a former general secretary of the Multan Press Club, was granted interim bail till Dec 12 by Additional District and Sessions Judge Falak Sher Faroka on Saturday.

The Multan bench of the Lahore High Court had earlier granted interim bail to Afsheen’s grandfather Allah Ditta Sahu till Dec 9.

Multan District and Session Judge Malik Azharul Haq Awan directed the police authorities on Saturday to produce Mussarat Sahu before the court on Monday (today) in any case otherwise he might order registration of a case against the officials concerned.

Afsheen’s brother Arsalan had filed a habeas corpus petition with the district and sessions judge for the recovery of his father.

Fazeel Sahu claimed in a press statement that police were ‘victimizing’ him because he used to expose wrongdoings of the law enforcers through his ‘bold reporting’.

He claimed that on Nov 12 last, he received a call on his cell phone about the death of his cousin Mussarat Sahu’s daughter Afsheen when he was on way to his office on Abdali Road.

He sought a leave from the office and went to Marri Sahu for attending the last rites of Afsheen. He heard whispers about the mysterious death of the girl but ignored them for being a relative of the bereaved family.

A few days later the police summoned his uncle Allah Ditta and cousin Mussarat for investigations into the mysterious death of Afsheen. Fazeel further said that he accompanied his uncle and cousin in a meeting with the Multan DPO and managed to secure ‘relief’ for them.

Later, he learnt from some police officers that his rivals wanted to implicate him in the Afsheen murder case. He had no option but to go into hiding till securing a pre-arrest bail.

A computer science graduate, Afsheen reportedly wanted to marry her maternal cousin and class fellow Hassan Mustafa. Her parents allegedly married her forcibly to her paternal cousin Nouman, a GD pilot of the PAF based at Shorkot. Afsheen allegedly eloped with Hassan on November 1 last and took shelter with a family friend in Rawalpindi.

Relatives managed to bring her back on Nov 8 after assuring the family with which she had been staying that her will would be honoured. However, a few days later she died under mysterious circumstances at the Multan’s Gulshan-i-Mehar colony residence of her father.

Local chapter of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan moved and application with the Gulghast police station and expressed fear that she might have been killed for the sake of honour.

Multan police took action only when President Gen Pervez Musharraf ordered a thorough inquiry into the death of Afsheen.

A postmortem conducted on the body of Afsheen after exhumation on Nov 24 confirmed that she died an unnatural death and that she was strangled.