November 07, 2006	Tuesday	Shawwal 14, 1427

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RAWALPINDI, Nov 6: City police investigating Sunday’s murders of a couple and their 18-month-old daughter have picked up three suspects but feel the crime remains a mystery.

“Although we have made three arrests, the crime is still a mystery,” District Police Officer Saud Aziz told Dawn on Monday.

However, of the three suspects, Zaheer Khan, a friend of slain Sajid Habib, looked interesting to the interrogators for “changing his statements”.

Zaheer worked as an AC mechanic in the same company where deceased Sajid was the accountant and was last seen with Sajid at 10:30pm Saturday when the family returned from a visit to a relative.

What the police wanted to know was where he spent the time from 10:30pm till he was picked up for questioning on Sunday after the discovery of Sajid’s body in a thicket in Islamabad’s F-6 sector.

Zaheer, who took a Christian second wife against the will of his parents and first wife, told his interrogators that he left Sajid at his doorstep and returned home.

But by his wife’s account, he returned home around 2:30am Sunday, explaining that his car had broken down which made him late.

Car tyre marks found at the spot where Sajid’s body was found suggested to some that he was murdered somewhere else and the body was just dumped in Islamabad despite the heavy security in place for an international economic forum underway in the city.

In another statement to the interrogators, Zaheer claimed that he stayed with Sajid for an hour that night and had tea with him. But neighbours told police that they had visited Sajid’s house in Khurram Colony at 11pm and found his wife Sabiha all alone.

While three police teams, headed by SP Rawal Town Sardar Maqsood and DSPs Haseeb Shah and Rana Shahid, were trying to resolve the mystery, the two surviving sons of the murdered couple were blissfully ignorant of the enormity of the tragedy for them.