RAWALPINDI: The police arrested Syed Ahmed Shah, the secretary of late Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam Sami (JUI-S) leader Maulana Samiul Haq on murder charges and sought his physical remand for interrogation on Friday.

A senior police official told Dawn that the arrest came about after the police investigating team examined Syed Ahmed Shah’s first and last statements, which were conflicting.

“In his earlier statement, Ahmed Shah had claimed he had locked the main gate from outside when he left Maulana Sami alone at home to fetch drinking water from a filtration plant and later, he said he had not locked the gate when he left,” a police official close to the investigation said.

He said Syed Ahmed Shah has been arrested by the police in the murder case and that a four-day physical remand has been obtained from the local court of law.

He said Ahmed Shah had been in police custody before and that he was released after investigation later. He has now formally been arrested after getting permission from the family of Maulana Samiul Haq.

Syed Ahmed Shah was arrested after police found his first and last statements conflicting

JUI-S leader Maulana Samiul Haq was killed in his Safari Villa in Bahria Town on Nov 2 last year when Ahmed Shah had allegedly gone to get water from a nearby filtration plant.

Considered a key witness in the case, Syed Ahmed Shah was allowed to participate in the late senator’s funeral but he went missing soon after. He was picked up for investigation a couple of weeks later but was allowed to go.

Though the police investigation into the murder of the JUI-S leader was inconclusive, an interim challan had been submitted by the police in the court of an additional session judge after a month.

The police was to submit the interim challan within a fortnight of the murder.

The interim challan contained statements of Maulana Sami’s secretary and an investigation report on more than 20 other individuals, mobile phone records of the slain JUI-S leader, the preliminary statement of Ahmed Shah and the police investigation report.

The police were still waiting for a DNA report of the samples taken from the body of the deceased and the blood found elsewhere in the crime scene. However, the investigation team had already received the maulana’s mobile phone data.

The police had also made an attempt to exhume the body for a post-mortem but the concerned court of law and the family of the deceased had refused to allow the police to do so.

The request was made to the additional session judge by the Rawalpindi police’s Homicide Unit which was forwarded to a court in Nowshera which rejected it.

The police said that the circumstances of the former senator’s assassination will become clearer after the arrest of Ahmed Shah’s arrest and may also lead to more arrests.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2019