MULTAN, June 15: The district police have yet to resolve the mystery shrouding the murder of a British national 12 days ago. The police have interrogated over 150 people so far in the case.

Alan Cox, 60, was murdered on June 3 last at his rented apartment in busy Ghanta Ghar Chowk by three assailants. The postmortem report revealed that Alan was attacked with both blunt and sharp-edged weapons before being shot at.

The police started investigation on the assumptions that the incident was either a terrorist act against a foreigner, a dacoity bid or an outcome of some kind of personal enmity. However, they later narrowed their focus to personal enmity after the release of the postmortem report.

DPO Hamid Mukhtar Gondal told Dawn on Tuesday that allegations of immoral acts committed by the teacher had prompted the police to go for the personal enmity element. However, the police had interrogated more than 150 people in connection with the murder mystery, but to no avail. Most of those interrogated were said to be Alan's pupils, who used to attend his spoken English classes during the last two or three years. But the police could not extract anything substantial, except some more scandalous details about the deceased.

Alan used to conduct English language classes at his rented apartment after opting to stay in Multan in March 1996. Information gleaned from his website (www.english.says.it) titled "An English teacher in Multan" quoted him as saying that he was a mathematics teacher in the early 1980s in a UK school where a sizable number of Pakistani students was also studying.

He also started learning Urdu from his Pakistani pupils for achieving conversational ease and telling his pupils: "If I can learn Urdu, you can learn English." Later, he started conducting classes of spoken English for adults, who came to the UK from various parts of the world, including Pakistan.

In 1985, he first came to Pakistan as a tourist and for what he said "practicing Urdu." Afterwards, he frequently visited the country before finally deciding to settle down here as an English language instructor in 1996.

He, however, used to return and stay at his native Manchester town from May to the middle of August in summer vacation. Another senior police official, who did not want to be named, commented that there was no capable investigator in Multan who could tackle (such) difficult cases.

There were reports that the investigation and the watch and ward wings of the local police had developed some serious differences, he said. He also said this rivalry had also rendered the Multan police incapable of resolving mysteries of some other incidents, including the "Sadaf double murder case."

Sadaf, 30, and her four-year-old daughter were slaughtered more than a month ago by some unknown assailants at Shalimar colony. Evidences had suggested that the killers were some acquaintances to the victims, but the police have yet to unmask them.