MULTAN: Mufti Qawi, the suspended member of Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee, has been nominated an accused in case regarding murder of Qandeel Baloch.
Police stated that his pictures with the slain Facebook star ‘caused the murder’. Superintendent of Police Cantonment area, Saifullah Khan Khattak has said that the pictures that Baloch clicked with the clergyman in Karachi led to her death.
He further said that the police could not hand him a clean chit until investigations are concluded. The murdered social media personality had met Qawi around two months before she was killed by her younger brother for ‘honour’ on July 16 in Multan.
Baloch had clicked selfies with Qawi during her meeting with him in a house in Karachi. After the pictures surfaced, Qawi was suspended from his post and he is fighting a legal case.
Mufti, on the other hand has said that it is unfair to tighten the noose around him after Waseem, the key criminal has confessed to the crime and named co-conspirators.
He has claimed innocence ever since he was contacted by police right after her murder. This is not the first time Qawi, as he puts it, being dragged into the case as police had dispatched a questionnaire to him earlier asking several questions the department deemed right for investigation.
The cleric provided Multan police with the answers required in which he claimed that he met Baloch once in Karachi and that was it. Waseem, during a polygraph test last month in Lahore stated that Haq Nawaz, his cousin strangled the Facebook celebrity while he grabbed her arms.
He also revealed that the his elder brother who resides in Saudi Arabia telephoned the family after Baloch’s pictures with the clergyman saw the light of the day and taunted him of being a mere spectator when their sister was being ‘ridiculed’ in the society.
The murder came few days after her three marriages were revealed none of which was still in place. She is survived by a son she had with a resident of Kot Addu area, Aashiq Hussain, late social media personality’s first husband. However, she never took her son in after divorcing Hussain in 2010, two years after the marriage.
The killing by her first relative, her younger brother to reclaim so-called honour of the family prompted movement in department concerned about which Prime Minister’s daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif told that a law would soon be introduced.
The country lacks a law to nab murderers who commit the crime for ‘honour’ after the parents or close relatives pardon the culprit. In Baloch’s case, state became a litigant thus slain star’s parents, although they claimed of having no such intentions, could not pardon Waseem and others involved and investigations are underway.
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