December 25, 2003

Had President Musharraf not been apprised of the murder of Afsheen Mussarat, would the crime have gone unnoticed? asks Nadeem Saeed

The cold-blooded murder of Afsheen Mussarat in the name of ‘honour’ and the initial tepid response by the police have once again highlighted the miseries of women, and the insensitivity of the law enforcement agencies that are supposed to protect the right to life of all the citizens, especially of those who are vulnerable.

Mussarat died on November 12, 2003, at her father advocate Mussarat Hussain’s house in Multan. Her family buried her the next day at their ancestral village Marri Sahu in Kabirwala tehsil of Khanewal district.

However, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s (HRCP) Multan Task Force’s coordinator, advocate Rashid Rehman, filed an application with the Gulgashat police station to draw the attention of the law enforcers towards the mysterious circumstances under which Mussarat died. He also expressed concern that she might have been killed for the ‘sake of honour’.

A graduate in computer sciences from the Bahauddin Zakariya university, Mussarat belonged to the influential Sahu family of Kabirwala. She was married to her paternal cousin Nouman, a Pakistan Air Force pilot based at Shorkot, on September 13, 2003, reportedly against her will. She wanted to marry her maternal cousin Hasan Mustafa, who was her senior in the BCS course at the university.

The Sahu family is said to be divided into two political groups in the area, one supports the Hiraj of Chauki Mohan led by the state minister for information technology and parliamentary affairs, Raza Hayat Hiraj, while the other supports the Shah of Kattalpur led by Syed Fakhar Imam. Mussarat’s family belonged to the former group while Mustafa’s to the latter. Her family due to political differences and patriarchal prejudice rejected Mustafa’s proposal for their daughter.

Mussarat, however, refused to live with Nouman, and just a few days after their marriage, she went back to her parents. When her family started exerting pressure on her to return to her husband’s house, she reportedly left her parent’s house on November 1, and arrived in Rawalpindi along with Mustafa.

They rented a cottage at Bara Koh on the Islamabad-Murree road with the help of a friend and were in the process of filing a divorce suit with a civil court when Mustafa’s friend informed his parents about their whereabouts. Along with an acquaintance, Col. Alamgir Rajput, they showed up and surprised the couple on November 4, and later took them straight to the Army Guest House (AGH) in Rawalpindi.

According to an HRCP report, Col. Alamgir told the commission, in a conversation after Mussarat’s death, that he provided the couple shelter, took leave from his institution and came to Marri Sahu to convince her family to respect her wishes.

He later said that Mussarat’s father and some other relatives came to his place in Rawalpindi and assured him that they would accept all her demands, including security for Mustafa and her, and a divorce from Nouman and marriage to Mustafa.

Mussarat had refused to go back either to Multan or Marri Sahu, fearing danger to her life, and instead proposed that she would prefer to stay at Darul Aman until the execution of the divorce. But her demand was not accepted by her family and it was decided that she would stay at the place of Col. Khalid Sahu, a close relative of her father, until the divorce and for the following three months probationary period.

At this time Mussarat left the AGH with her maternal uncle Naveed Akhtar to proceed to Col. Khalid’s place on November 7. However, she was shifted to Multan during the night of November 8, under so far undisclosed circumstances. She was reported dead on November 12.

Mussarat’s sudden death gave rise to suspicions that she might have been killed. The suspicions became more serious when her family kept changing their stance about the cause of her death. Sometimes they said that she died of a cardiac arrest, sometimes they cited electric shock as the cause, and then they said she died due to some respiratory disease.

The police initially accorded a lukewarm response to the application of Rashid Rehman. Multan district police officer, Hamid Mukhtar Gondal, made it clear to an HRCP delegation that under the Qisas and Diyat laws the police could not take action without the consent of the deceased’s heirs.

At this point the human rights activist Asma Jehangir wrote a letter to the Punjab chief minister and sought his help alleging that the Multan police were under the influence of a minister of state belonging to the Khanewal district.

A response from the chief minster was still awaited when reportedly a senior journalist from Lahore brought the matter to the knowledge of President Pervez Musharraf, during the latter’s meeting with journalists at an iftar dinner organized at the presidency in the month of Ramazan.

In a statement on November 20, the President’s House condemned crimes against women, and ordered an inquiry into the circumstances of Mussarat’s death. The presidency claimed that the government had been striving for sensitizing people on according due status and dignity to women in society.

A medical board conducted a postmortem on Mussarat’s body on November 24, which confirmed that more than two people had strangled her to death. “Her body also had marks of resistance,” said a member of the board, who also disclosed that she was not properly buried. “We were in hurry,” Mussarat’s father told the police when interrogated in this regard.

Not only did the president of Pakistan take note of the matter, the police also initiated their proceedings as their ‘normal course of action’. Mussarat’s father and grandfather Allah Ditta were summoned by the DPO and allowed to leave on the pressure of some political influential who assured the law enforcers that they would produce the ‘culprits’ whenever they were needed, a police source told TR.

When the postmortem report confirmed the murder, all of the Sahu clan’s men went into hiding. Mussarat’s father, however, was arrested on November 26, and confessed to his crime, claiming that he alone took his daughter’s life by tying her dupatta around her neck after administering her a meal which drugged her.

However, the police did not believe his statement and later on the chemical examiner’s report also supported their assertion. The report says that no poison was detected from the viscera of the deceased. “Mussarat Hussain wanted to shoulder the whole blame in order to save his accomplices,” said Multan district police officer Hamid Mukhtar Gondal.

Besides her father, her maternal uncle Naveed Sahu is also in police custody while the other suspects have been granted pre-arrest bail from the local courts up to December 20. They are her grandfather Allah Ditta, brother Arsalan, Fazeel Raza, Hammad Karamat, Taufiq Ahmed, advocate Naseer Thaheem and Mazhar Dharala.

A close relative of the deceased, who requested anonymity, disclosed some ‘facts’ to TR about Mussarat’s murder. According to him, the decision to take the couple’s life was made in a Sahu family meeting held at the Gulshan-i-Mehar residence of Mussarat Hussain.

According to the relative, attending the meeting were Mussarat Hussain, Allah Ditta, Azhar Hussain, Ghazanfar Ali, Nouman, Asif, Kasim, Taufiq Ahmed, Dr Mazhar, Fazeel, Naveed Akhtar and an army officer belonging to the clan. Mustafa, however, had been in hiding since he last met Mussarat on November 7, at the AGH in Rawalpindi, he added.

He alleged Mussarat’s father twice attempted to poison his daughter with tea on November 11, but she refused to take it. He said there were some five people directly involved in her murder, including her father and grandfather, which took place at around 8 am. He said the other three were close relatives; of them, two were present in the house even at sehri time while the third came with Allah Ditta from Marri Sahu for the “mission” early in the morning.

Two lawyer friends of Mussarat Hussain brought an ambulance to take the girl’s body to Marri Sahu for burial. “The lawyer friends were the same people who were invited for iftar by Mussarat a day before the murder,” he added.

Unused to modern ways of investigation, the police are now waiting for the cancellation of the interim bails of the suspects to resolve the mystery of how many people were involved in her murder.

When asked, HRCP’s Rashid Rehman said that it was ironical how the police always needed a ‘presidential order’ to take note of crimes committed against women. He pointed out that the police had taken action in the notorious panchayat enforced gang-rape in Meerwala only when it was brought to the notice of the higher echelons of the government.

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