LAHORE: A man allegedly committed suicide after killing his two mentally and physically challenged daughters in Sanda area here on Wednesday.

Zia Butt, 70, first allegedly slit the throats of his daughters Sadia (34) and Aqsa (31) and then injured his neck with the same weapon.

Police investigators claimed that Butt killed his daughters out of concern for their future as they were both mentally and physically challenged owing to a congenital disorder.

“Four family members were living in a small single-storey house at Rajgarh,” Iqbal Town Division SP retired Capt Muhammad Ajmal told Dawn.

He said the police was alerted about the killing by a neighbour who called 15 in the wee hours of Wednesday.

A police team reached the house along with a Rescue 1122 crew, recovered bodies of the two women and found their critically injured father lying in a pool of blood in a room of the house.

The SP said the mother of the girls, the only survivor, shared details of the incident, saying that Butt locked Sadia and Aqsa’s room from inside and killed them. She also said he loved his daughters and used to look after them all day – from feeding them to changing their clothes.

She told police when her husband went into their daughters’ room and locked it at around 5am, she thought he was taking care of them in routine. A short while later, she heard the cries of her husband and knocked at the door. When he unlocked it, she found him in a pool of blood and both the daughters dead after which she immediately alerted her neighbours who called the police.

Rescue 1122 rushed Butt to hospital, but he died on the way.

According to the woman, Butt was really concerned about the future of his daughters due to their special needs. “Who would take care of my paralysed and helpless daughters after my death?” she quoted her husband as having said before going to bed on Tuesday night.

The SP ruled out the possibility of involvement of the woman in the killing due to her age.

“However, Zia Butt was very healthy and a strong man even in his ‘70s,” he said, adding that the woman refused to lodge a criminal case.

Even then police collected samples from the crime scene, sent them for forensic analysis and started investigation into the case.

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2021