Police suspect family burnt girl over her wish to marry cousin

An investigation into the death of a 15-year-old girl due to a mysterious fire inside her house has led the police to suspect her family’s involvement on the basis of the girl’s mobile phone records that reveal she wished to marry her cousin, The News has learnt.

The investigators have reached the conclusion that no one had broken into the house to set her on fire. They have also conducted chemical examinations of the evidences recovered from the scene to ascertain the identities of the people involved in the incident.

Sidra Mansoor was shifted from her Model Colony residence to the Burns Centre at the Civil Hospital Karachi with 100 per cent burn wounds on April 12, but she succumbed to her injuries in less than two hours of the incident.

On April 15, after returning to the city following the burial in Larkana, Sidra’s maternal uncle Riaz Hussain filed a complaint under Sections 336B (hurt by corrosive substance) and 302/34 (murder by common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code and Article 7 (terrorism) of the Anti-Terrorism Act at the Model Colony police station.

“The police took two of Sidra’s classmates in custody for interrogation on the complainant’s suspicion, but they were found to be innocent after questioning,” ASI Liaquat Ali told The News.

The police official said that when the investigators took the girl’s mobile phone in custody, they found that all her data had been deleted.

“The police then retrieved her data by writing to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.”

On the basis of the mobile phone records, the investigators were able to establish the fact that Sidra wished to marry her 32-year-old cousin, but her family was against the idea because of the age difference, added the ASI.

“The police were able to trace the whereabouts of the cousin, a journalist associated with a regional newspaper, to be close to his residence in Saddar on the day of the fire incident.”

ASI Ali said that while Sidra’s exchange of text messages with her cousin showed that the two had developed some differences, the investigators, after exploring all the aspects of the case, suspected that the girl’s family was behind her murder.

A senior police official probing the case said the teenager’s family members were employed by different departments of the Sindh government, claiming that they were trying to pressurise the investigators into resolving the case with a favourable outcome for them.

“Inspection of the scene of the incident and the post-mortem report of the deceased have raised many questions,” he told The News.

“If Sidra had set herself on fire, then she should have cried out in pain and moved around, but neither were there any indications of her movement nor had she screamed.”

The official said that it seemed that she was drugged and then set on fire, adding that it was quite difficult to prove if she was drugged because the family had pressured the police into allowing only a superficial autopsy to ascertain the girl’s identity.

Inspector Raja Muhammad Shahbaz, the Model Colony station investigation officer, told The News: “We are waiting for the report of the chemical examination to ascertain the names of the people involved in the murder.”

Inspector Shahbaz added that the police had also sent the mobile phones of the girl’s family members for forensic examination to further aid the investigation.