LAHORE, March 9: Police claimed on Tuesday to have arrested the third suspect involved in the murder of Dawn's marketing executive Shehryar Safir. They also claimed that the arrested man had confessed his crime.

Saying that the murder mystery had been solved with the arrest of the third suspect, Lahore police investigation wing chief Shafqaat Ahmad and ASP Shariq Kamal told Dawn that the arrested man, Nadeem Ahmad, had played a major role in the murder.

Two other persons, including a woman (who is Nadeem's sister), are allegedly involved in the case and are already in the police custody. Mr Safir, 28, was found lying unconscious with a bullet injury in his car parked along a road in Faisal Town on Feb 17. A police patrol had removed him to the Jinnah Hospital where he died due to profuse bleeding.

The ASP said the clues to the murder were traced from the calls retrieved from Mr Safir's cell phone and his belongings collected from his room. "Letters written by the woman to Mr Safir recovered from his room indicated that they knew each other well," he said.

"Although most of those letters showed friendly relations between them, some recent ones carried clear murder threats," he added. He also said the woman had confessed to having planned the murder. "She had told us that she had executed the plan through her brother and an acquaintance," K Adnan.

Betrayal, she said, was the motive behind the murder," quoted the ASP, who added: "She also kept claiming that she only wanted to teach a lesson to Mr Safir and not actually kill her."

The investigator said Adnan was arrested from Sialkot, but he didn't confess the crime and kept claiming that the girl wanted to implicate him just to save her brother.

Finally, he said, the police had succeeded in arresting Nadeem after several raids in Sialkot and its suburbs. "After his arrest, Nadeem has confessed that he had called the deceased for a meeting outside a bakery in Faisal Town where shot him." The officer said the police had collected enough evidence to establish the case in a court of law.