KARACHI, Oct 15: Three young sisters, two of them handicapped, were on Saturday killed in their Orangi Town residence and their bodies were found in a pond set up for their father’s cattle, police said.

While investigators have yet to find a link that could lead them to those involved in the triple murder case, they were sure that the three girls, aged between 16 years and eight years, were either poisoned to death or strangled before their bodies were thrown into the pond to make the killings look like a drowning.

The Mominabad police said that the victim girls — 16-year-old Uzma, 11-year-old Sumera and eight-year-old Nisha — were living with their father Sher Muhammad, a dairy farmer, in Mairajun Nabi Colony in Orangi Town’s Sector 10.

The victims’ father had set up a small dairy farm in his house.

They said the area people informed the police about the incident in the morning and by the time the police reached there the three bodies had been fished out from the pool. However, an initial examination of the crime-scene cast doubts over the drowning story, as the pond was merely two feet deep and it was not possible even for the youngest sibling to get drowned in such a shallow pool.

The bodies were shifted to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for a post-mortem examination.

The initial findings of the medico-legal examination suggested that the girls died from suffocation and not by drowning.

Doctors also did not find any resistance mark on any of the body.

Victims Uzma and Sumera were physically handicapped while their sister Nisha was said to be suffering from some mental ailment.

Mominabad SHO Inspector Nisar Lodhi told Dawn that Sher Muhammad told the police that he was sleeping along with his two sons and a daughter in a room, while his three elder daughters were sleeping in the veranda.

When he got up in the morning, he found the bodies of his three daughters in the pond.

The area SHO said that the victims’ mother was currently in Punjab.

“There are several doubts which need to be cleared. We are hopeful about reaching the killers very soon.”

A case (FIR 371/2011) was lodged under Sections 302 (premeditated murder) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code against unidentified persons on a complaint of the victims’ father at the Mominabad police station.