Kupwara: Police has solved the murder mystery of a nine-year-old from Khurhama, Lolab by arresting her father on the charges of committing murder.
The man, identified as Mohammad Iqbal Khatana, was arrested for allegedly suffocating her nine-year-old daughter to death and then slitting her throat in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district, police said on Monday.
“Mohammad Iqbal Khatana was arrested last week for the March 29 killing of his minor daughter,” SSP Kupwara Yougal Manhas told reporters in Kupwara.
Addressing a press conference, Senior Superintendent Police Kupwara, Yougal Manhas said, “Following the cold-blooded murder of a nine-year-old girl in Kupwara, police started an investigation in which several suspects including the father of the slain girl Mohammad Iqbal Khatana were arrested. He was arrested as the prime suspect.”
Narrating the sequence of events, he said Khatana’s relations with his wife, Nageena Begum, were strained for the last year and they would often quarrel.
“On the day of the crime, Khatana, a cab driver by profession, had a heated argument with his wife in the morning. After returning from work in the evening, he took a kitchen knife intending to commit suicide,” the officer said.
While the accused was leaving the house on the pretext of getting a punctured tyre fixed, his daughter Uzma asked him for Rs 5.
“Khatana gave her a Rs 10 currency note. His wife followed him up to the courtyard. However, Uzma followed her father up to the main road,” the officer said.
The other members of the family, including the girl’s mother, presumed that Uzma had gone with her father.
“Khatana took Uzma in his vehicle and drove around for more than an hour, waiting for the roads to get deserted so that he could kill himself.
“As people left for Taraweeh, he drove his vehicle to Her-Khurhama, near a transformer, where he halted the vehicle. There, out of mental anguish due to domestic issues with his wife, he suffocated Uzma for around two to three minutes, as a result of which the girl died on the spot,” the officer said.
The accused then drove to his house and carried his daughter’s body to a spot next to the firewood shed of his uncle’s house.
“He placed the body in the shed in the supine position (chest facing upwards) and then slit her throat with the knife, so that the blame falls on the occupants of the adjacent houses,” the officer said.
The accused then returned home, where the other family members raised a hue and cry when they saw Uzma was not with him.
Subsequently, the accused, along with a few others, went to the Khurhama police post in his vehicle to get a missing report lodged for Uzma.
“In the meanwhile, locals found the body of the girl from the shed. After post-mortem and thorough discussion with the doctors, we came to know that Iqbal had first strangulated his daughter and then slit her throat with the knife.”
The police officer said that after corroborating the evidence, Iqbal was interrogated and he confessed to the crime.
“He has been arrested and the knife he used has also been recovered,” the officer said, adding that so far investigations revealed that Iqbal was the sole accused in the crime.
