THAT was one remarkable news conference; it would offer an active, willing opposition and angry anchors so many angles to work on. By any stretch of the imagination, it was not good advertisement for a man, who, if everything goes according to his well-wishers’ plans, should soon be running a campaign to be the next prime minister of the country.

That presser to wound up the search for a serial killer in Kasur was the most unwanted thing that could have happened to the PML-N. Even by the current idiom, even by Shahbaz Sharif standards, the show was in bad taste. But that, unfortunately, was the start of the celebratory party.

The party chooses to noisily gloss over that little celebration ceremony that proudly unveiled everyone from the personnel belonging to the secret agencies to the police to the victim’s father to the chief minister ordering the bureaucrats around to stand up with yet more.

Gradually, as the pieces in the puzzle are put together, the experienced, trained brains in the police force know intuitively that they are close to cracking this one.

The PML-N’s answer to the criticism could well be even louder celebrations. Good luck to the happy gang then. Others could do well to reflect on the gaps that Kasur so horrifyingly brought to the fore.

The case could have gone this way. A young girl is kidnapped, raped and murdered in the town — unfortunately not the first one to have met the fate in recent times. Her body is found on a pile of trash at a construction site, or at the corner of a street.

Everyone but a mad editor who assigns to himself the very unique task of discovering art in human misery is up in protest. A search is launched by the police.

A series of clues and sources, courtesy of the intelligence network in place, lead the police to the house of a suspect in close vicinity to the home of the murdered girl.

Essentially, the police go by the old rules perfected by experience. They understand that quite often the culprit in the case is someone close to the family, who the murdered child was familiar with.

This ‘assumption’ is strengthened by footage from a street camera which shows the girl walking across, holding the hand of an unrecognised man.

The suspect is surely known to the girl’s family. He is known to wear his piety on his sleeve and known to change his getups. According to one version of the story, only recently he was conspicuous by his absence at his father’s chehlum. This is a sure enough cause for suspicion.

The 23-year-old suspect makes himself all the more suspicious by breaking into a fit as he is interrogated by the police.

He says he has had a heart attack and pleads with the police — or he pleads with the complainants by drawing upon his respectable reputation in the neighbourhood — to let him go. But the police are not fooled.

The police have seen enough such bluffs in their life to be hoodwinked by the man’s dramatic antics. They hold him, and ask him questions about the latest rape-and-murder incident and similar such cases over the past couple of years. They sense they are on to something here.

Gradually, as the pieces in the puzzle are put together, the experienced, trained brains in the police force know intuitively that they are close to cracking this one. They try and avoid a media which is in a fix of its own over the sensational nature of the news. They are undecided how much to reveal and when, exercising caution wherever they can in the interest of the investigation.

The debate in the media centres around if it is okay to use the image and of the girl in the media. The young ones in the press corps are excited by the notion of building a campaign around the young girl’s photograph that could not just lead to the perpetrator in Kasur but could herald some changes in the system that is all too indifferent to the demands of the current times.

The old timers are a little reluctant to jump on the new-era media bandwagon. They would rather stay the old course that refuses to allow the flashing of the victim’s picture. They sound a little out of sync with the others in the race: it is fine for them to claim having forced a slipshod police force into action here but will they take the blame for the mob frenzy that led to widespread violence including firing by police that killed two protesters?

Away from action involving the media, the police go about quietly and responsibly in tying the knots by using intelligence sources, piecing together various witness accounts and playing on the inconsistencies in the suspect’s accounts. By the time they hand over the suspect to the forensics, the police are almost sure that they have got their man.

It could well have happened this way but there are so many sources around refuting this version. Some of these details might match the entries in the police file but overall this was exactly how it did not happen.

It was a probe in reverse, so to speak. It was the DNA which led the search rather than it being the other way round.

The chief minister says it was his forensic lab and its DNA scientists who provide the break in the investigation. And even though he tries to appear generous in his praise for the ‘others’ who were part of the investigation team he does offer a kind of admission.

He admits to the sheer inefficiency of an entire system that must exist between the occurrence of the crime and the ultimate moment when a suspect undergoes a DNA test. The total reliance on this test does expose that the system as a whole is badly in need of quick reforms. This is not exactly something to be proud of.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2018