20 people tortured to death at shrine in Pakistan’s Punjab
Twenty people, including six members of a family, were murdered and four others wounded on Sunday at a Pakistani Sufi shrine by its “psychotic and paranoid” custodian, police said. Four women were among those killed at the Shrine of Mohammad Ali Gujjar in Pakistan’s Punjab province, according to police, who said they had arrested the shrine’s custodian.
By : migrator
Update: 2017-04-02 17:33 GMT
Islamabad
“The 50-year-old shrine custodian Abdul Waheed has confessed that he killed these people because he feared that they had come to kill him,” regional police chief Zulfiqar Hameed told news agency AFP.
According to Deputy Commissioner Liaqut Ali Chatha, the incident took place at the dargah of Muhammad Ali Gujjar in a village in Sargodha district, around 200 km from Lahore. The incident happened at around midnight.
Local police station chief Shamshir Joya said the victims, whose clothes were torn and bloodstained, appeared to have been given intoxicants. “We suspect that the victims had been given some intoxicants before they were murdered, but we will wait for forensics report to confirm this suspicion,” he added. Joya said the shrine was built in the area some two and a half years ago. When its former custodian died, Waheed, a one-time employee of the national election commission took over.
“The suspect appears to be paranoid and psychotic, or it could be related to rivalry for the control of shrine,” Hameed said, adding that the investigation was under way.
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