GUJAR KHAN: Mystery shrouds the killing of a woman belonging to Pakpattan whose body was found lying alongside the GT Road near Lehry forests in the jurisdiction of Sohawa police on March 11.

The mutilated body with stab wounds and acid burns was later buried by the police declaring it “unidentified”. The police then registered a case on its own and started investigations.

Station House Officer (SHO) Inspector Ahsan Butt told Dawn that the police after matching her fingerprints with Nadra records identified the deceased as Tahira Nosheen Rana, a resident of Chak-33 SP, Pakpattan. She turned out to be a journalist attached with a local Urdu paper.

He said her heirs were also traced and her brother approached the police and claimed that she had not been in contact with the family since 2018 after she got divorced from her first husband and married to another man. He said the first husband of his sister had died and she had a daughter from him.

According to the SHO, her brother requested that the police let her body remain buried in the Sohawa graveyard.

Replying to a question, the SHO said that the woman’s second husband had also been contacted and would join the investigation soon. He said three criminal cases were found registered against the deceased in Pakpattan and Lahore police stations while she was also a complainant and a witness in several cases.

In an interview available on Facebook with a journalist in Islamabad, the deceased had stated that her second husband had already married five women and had contracted his seventh marriage after marrying her.

“This is a gang very active in Lahore that lures well-settled women after building relationships with them to get financial benefits,” she had alleged in the interview. In the video, she also alleged that her husband had subjected her to assault and blackmailing after she applied for Khula.

“He had also kept me hostage for four months at different places and recorded my obscene videos after intoxicating me and sent them to my family and friends”, she alleged in the video.

Talking about cases registered against her, she claimed that her husband had given her cheques after faking her signatures to different people while she was kept hostage, adding his aim was to confiscate her property. She alleged that her husband had also attempted to take her life multiple times. She also claimed that her husband had made a plan to put the blame of her death on her brother and other family members. She had also soiught justice and protection from the authorities.

Interestingly, in another video statement recorded earlier on April 9, 2023, she had claimed that she and her husband were receiving life threats from her family members, including her brother. She had also claimed in the video that she was having property disputes with her family members.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2024