Christian Woman Murdered
A Christian widow and a mother of three, Shazia Imran of Lahore, was abducted, raped, murdered, and her body doused with acid by four Muslim men after she reportedly refused to convert to Islam and marry one of the accused.
Shazia Imran, 40, lived with her three children in a rented house in Lahore’s Mehar Town. The main accused, Mani Gujjar, is a considered a notorious person in the area and he had been pressuring Shazia to change her faith along with her children and marry him. Shazia did not share this with her family due to fears for her security but three days before her abduction on June 6, she told her sister-in-law that Gujjar had threatened to kill her if she did not surrender to his demand.
Shazia’s brother Zafar Masih alleged that Shazia’s husband Imran, was also murdered a year and a half previously, by the same people, but the police turned that incident into a case of accidental death to protect the influential accused.
Shazia was working as a nanny at the daycare center at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in order to earn a livelihood for her children after her husband’s death. On the evening of June 6, Shazia left home for work but did not return. Her family started searching for her but failed. On June 7, the police were informed of her disappearance. Later in the day, the family received a call from the higher police station that they had found a body that matched Shazia’s description. The family rushed to the spot and found out that that it was indeed Shazia’s dead body.
Her jugular vein had been slit with a sharp object and her body had been badly burnt by acid. The forensic examination also revealed that she had been raped before being killed. The police had arrested the main accused, Mani Gujjar and he had also confessed to the murder. They seemed uninterested in arresting the other three accused, including Gujjar’s brother and two cousins.
The accused are very influential and are threatening the family to pressure them to reconcile and withdraw the case. The victim’s family has been forced to go into hiding due to these threats and is not even free to pursue the case. Gujjar is still in police custody but the family doubts there will be justice for Shazia, as the police’s bias is evidenced by its inaction against the remaining accused.
Soon after a video appeal by the family went viral on social media, drawing reaction from a broad spectrum of users, the Punjab Police tweeted from its official handle that it regretted that the murder was being termed as a religious issue. “The arrested accused, in his confessional statement, has said that the woman had developed relations with him after her husband’s death and had now started blackmailing him,” the tweet stated in Urdu.
The tweet was however conspicuously silent on why the remaining three accused had not yet been arrested; and what evidence the police had found that incriminated the deceased woman in the blackmailing charge leveled by the accused.