Prayer leader strangles cousin over ‘illicit relations with wife’

SITE Super Highway police said that during an interrogation on Saturday a prayer leader had confessed to killing his 17-yaer-old cousin, who too was an imam and had been missing since August 10.

Qari Muhammad Arshad, 35, strangled his cousin, Gulfaraz Khan, over suspicion of having illicit relations with his wife, SHO Anaar Khan told The News.

He said the suspect was arrested in connection with the mysterious disappearance of the teenage boy. Arshad had helped his cousin in getting the job of a prayer leader at the Saima Towers’ housing project on the Super Highway, he added.

Arshad, the prayer leader of a mosque in the city’s Khawaja Ajmair Nagri area, told the interrogators that he had dumped the body inside an empty plot in Umar Goth, Northern Bypass, SHO Khan said.

The police recovered the body from the location and moved it to hospital for a post-mortem examination.

A day earlier, a horrific murder was reported in Gulshan-e-Sikandarabad as a man’s first spouse slit the throat of his second wife, a 17-year-old girl who had married two months ago. 

Jackson police SHO Shaoor Khan Bangash said 35-year-old Shahnaz, wife of Jumman, slit Fatima’s throat at a house situated on Street 7 of Gulshan-e-Sikandarabad. The man told police that his first wife had been pressurising him to divorce Fatima. “My refusal to accept her demand infuriated Shahnaz and she killed my second wife,” Jumman told the police.