LAHORE: A Pakistani court has given police two weeks to interrogate a suspect arrested in the brutal killings of eight children in the eastern city of Kasur.
Ahsanullah Chauhan, a police investigator, says the suspect, Mohammad Imran, was presented before a judge in Lahore on Wednesday, amid tight security.
Imran’s arrest came two weeks after 8-year-old Zainab Ansari was assaulted and her body thrown in a garbage dump early this month. He is suspected in her death and in those of at least seven other children.
Zainab’s death stirred outrage across the country and brought to light the other abductions and slayings by a suspected serial predator.
Police said on Tuesday that Imran had confessed to the murders.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Interior Rehman Malik on Wednesday requested that the Senate take up a bill seeking public hanging of those found guilty of kidnapping or raping children under the age of 14, DawnNews reported.
The amendments to the existing legislation, which have been approved by the Senate committee, seek changes to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) in relation to punishments for the offence of the kidnapping of children, Malik said in a letter to the Senate Secretariat, which has been acquired by DawnNews.
The bill proposed by the committee, entitled the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2018, seeks to amend the Pakistan Penal Code Act 1860s Section 364-A (kidnapping or abducting a person under the age of 14) so that the punishment for the crime is a public execution.
Section 364-A currently reads: “Whoever kidnaps or abducts any person under the [age of fourteen] in order that such person may be murdered or subjected to grievous hurt … or to the lust of any person [sic] shall be punished with death.”
The amendment seeks to add the phrase, “by hanging publicly”, after the word “death” in the current legislation, the letter said.
Malik in the letter requested the House take up the bill before the current Senate session ends.
He said that Zainab’s killer should be made an example of by executing him publicly.
Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif, while announcing the arrest at a press conference last night, had seconded the demand for a public hanging of the culprit after conviction in court, and stressed that this is what Zainab’s family, he himself, and the entire nation wants.
Meanwhile, detailing the incidents leading to Imran’s arrest, police said two large buttons on either shoulder of his jacket were a significant clue that helped the police zero in on him, BBC said in a report.
According to the report, an officer on the case shared the details of how the police went through the investigation process with them.
The Kasur district has a population of over 3 million people, of which 0.7 million live in Kasur city. Even after filtering out women, children and old men from that demographic, the police were still left with at least 60 to 70 thousand men — only one of which was their suspect, BBC said.
Out of these thousands, the search was further narrowed down to 1100 men, all living within the radius of the investigation.
The Pakistan Forensic Science Agency collected DNA samples of all of these men and compared each with that of Zainab’s rapist, as their 1,110 strong DNA database gradually exhausted.
It was during this tedious process that Imran’s DNA was found to a perfect match with that of Zainab’s rapist.
Once that evidence came to light, police went looking for Imran — now the prime suspect — at his house and were later able to arrest him with the assistance of his mother, BBC said.
During the raid, police found a jacket with large buttons on both shoulders, similar to the one the rapist was seen wearing in the CCTV footage that surfaced when Zainab first went missing.
The police officer told BBC that this was a tricky piece of the puzzle as in the black and white CCTV footage the jacket appeared to be white, which meant it could be of any dark colour in actuality.
According to the officer, finding the jacket among Imran’s belongings helped them make sure that he was indeed the man they were looking for.
Imran’s mother and paternal uncle said they did become suspicious when they first saw the CCTV footage on TV and thought the man in the video looked like Imran but they did not bother to tell the police about it.
Imran, per the report, said in his confession that he killed the girls due to the fear of being caught for raping them. Of his eight victims, he said he raped and murdered five in under-construction houses, while three others — including Zainab — were raped and murdered close to the heaps of trash where their bodies were found.
Imran also said that he killed the children and disposed of their bodies the same day as raping them.
