LAHORE: A lady health worker (LHW) and her three children were found shot dead at their house in Kahna area early on Wednesday.

As per police, the bodies of LHW Naheed Mubarak (45), her son Taimur Sultan (20) and daughters Mahnoor Fatima (15) and Jannat (10), who were shot in the head by unidentified killer(s), were found lying in a room of their three-storey house.

The police said another son of the LHW, who was asleep in an adjoining portion of the house, remained safe.

According to initial police inquiries, Naheed had been divorced by her husband in 2004 and was running a gynae clinic in a portion of her house.

The families living in other portions of the building, as well as the surviving son of the woman, told police they did not hear any gunshots.

Lahore Operations SSP Mustansar Feroze told Dawn it would be premature to say anything conclusive about the identity of the killer(s) and the motive behind the murders. He said the police experts suspected that the woman and her children might have been killed in a state of semi-consciousness as no marks of violence or resistance were found at the crime scene.

He said a footage captured by a closed-circuit TV camera installed in the street, however, showed a man arriving there in a car and visiting the house late in the night.

The LHW’s son told the police that the late night visitor was an attendant of a patient who visited his mother’s clinic.

The police teams were, however, trying to trace the car through private and Safe City Authority’s CCTV cameras to reach the visitor.

The SSP said initial investigations found out that the deceased woman had divided the three-story building in many small portions and rented these out to some 20 families. He said total 50 people were living in the building.

“It was a challenging task for police to question all those residing in the building, as most of them were reluctant to cooperate or share any information,” he said.

However, he said, the police came to know that the woman had a property dispute with her brothers and the case was also being investigated from this angle.

The bodies have been shifted to the city morgue for autopsy and further investigations are underway, he said.

Meanwhile, the chief minister and the IGP have sought a report from the police authorities on it.

Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2022