June 11, 2007	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 25, 1428

ISLAMABAD, June 10: A woman who lived in the house of a minister died under mysterious circumstances on Saturday.

Sources said on Sunday that Minister of State for Communications Mohammad Shahid Jamil Qureshi and Kafila Siddiqa, 40, a Canadian national of Pakistani origin, were classfellows at the Pak-American Institute of Management Sciences in the early 90s.

No complaint was lodged with police till the filing of this report.

Mustafa Qayyum and Mujtba Qayyum, brothers of the woman who arrived in Islamabad from Karachi, took her body to her native city for burial after autopsy, without asking police for any legal action.

The woman’s husband, Salman Qaisar, arrived in Karachi from Canada and would reach Islamabad on Monday, the sources said, adding that a case would be registered if he lodged a complaint with police.

Police said investigation into the case would start after the filing of a complaint by the victim’s family or if some wrongdoing was proved in the chemical examiner’s report.

The sources said police had not questioned anyone about the incident so far.

They said some marks of injury had been found on the body, including bruises on her chest, abdomen and chin.

The sources said the autopsy failed to determine the cause of her death, adding that body samples would be sent to the chemical examiner in Lahore on Monday to ascertain the cause of death.

They alleged that “some instructions had been given to doctors who carried out the autopsy to make the report positive”.

They claimed that a number of government officials and ministers had directed the administration of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences to make the autopsy report ‘positive’. However, Pims executive director Dr Fazle Hadi denied the allegation.

Four male doctors and another person conducted the autopsy. The sources alleged that the team had not followed necessary formalities while conducting the post-mortem.

The sources said the woman had no contact with her husband since February. Mr Qaisar had approached Interpol for the whereabouts of his wife.

Interpol had forwarded the letter to the Federal Investigation Agency in May asking police to locate the woman.

The Islamabad police had visited the minister’s house as the address was mentioned in the letter, but a guard of the house had told police that no one, except the minister, lived there.

The sources said Ms Siddiqa ran a consultancy firm at the private residence of the minister in G-11/3 sector where she had been living for two years.

They sources said the minister and Ms Siddiqa had visited Canada last December.

One of her brothers had stayed in the house along with Ms Siddiqa for some days in mid-April, the sources said.

Meanwhile, in a press note issued here on Sunday, the minister said that some hidden hands were plotting a conspiracy against him to tarnish his political image.

According to the note, the minister found Ms Siddiqa lying on the floor at around 10:30pm on the night of June 9. He and his driver took the woman to Pims where doctors said she had died one hour before. The post-mortem report was clear and doctors feared that she might have died due to ‘dehydration’, the note claimed.

The press note also said Ms Siddiqa had a dispute over money with her husband, and on her return from Canada in February she had told the minister that she had a quarrel with her husband and he had verbally divorced her.