by Sanam Maher
Four days later, CPO Akram dismissed the investigating officer handling the case for negligence. There was too much media interest—not just local but international—in this case, and too many people ready to criticize the Multan police for bungling it. There could be no mistakes. The CPO wanted someone he could rely on to handle it. “Madam, just watch,” one of Attiya’s wardens commented. “This case will now be hung around your neck.” She had never dealt with a suspected honour killing case before.
Attiya had joined the police force as a sub-inspector in 1988, when she was thirty-six. She is from Gujrat, and was posted to Sialkot as a city traffic warden. She stayed there for sixteen years, got married and had three sons. In 2008 she was sent to Multan and has been in the city ever since. On the day we meet, four months after she saw Qandeel’s body, she is preparing for another move. She has been promoted, some say because of how well she handled Qandeel’s case, and is waiting to find out where she will be posted next. She has had a few days off and looks relaxed, swapping her official black uniform for a bright floral shalwar kameez. She has only come into the office to hand over all the files and records from the Qandeel case to the next investigating officer.
Attiya’s family has a history of service in the police. Her father and his father before him were police officers, and many cousins have joined the force since. She has three brothers, and it was expected that they too would join the police. However, it was Attiya who went to her father and said she wanted to carry on the family tradition. “It was unheard of at the time for a girl to do something like that, especially in our family,” Attiya explains. Her family is conservative and proudly claim to be Syeds, an honorific title for those who say they are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s family. “I only managed to do this because I had such a great friendship with and such great love for my father. He took a stand for me, even when everyone else criticized him and said I should just become a teacher.” When friends and family members warned him that letting a girl join a profession dominated by men would bring shame and dishonour to his family, Attiya’s father would respond, “Respect and honour are in Allah’s hands. If it is her fate to be dishonourable and disrespectful, she will bring my family shame even if she becomes a teacher.”
Attiya’s mother agreed, and when her daughter had completed her studies ignored those who said it was now time to marry her off. Eventually, she said, her daughter would marry someone her parents chose for her. By the time she did, she was forty-two years old, and she was the first to marry someone outside the family. Even when she was married, and later, when she had children, she couldn’t think of quitting the police force. “The thought of just being in the home, cleaning it and sitting there all day and reading magazines—it didn’t make sense to me,” she says.
Attiya and her best friend took the police exams together and passed them. “I was among the first batch of women in Sialkot to join the police force,” she explains. There were only four of them. “There were no senior female officers we could turn to for advice or talk to.” It wasn’t always easy, but Attiya stuck it out and did not complain because she did not want her parents’ critics to say they had been right all along. Attiya and her colleagues had been brought up and educated to be polite, but superior officers would rebuke them if they addressed arrested men and women with the formal “aap,” rather than “tu.” They’ll never fear you and won’t tell you anything, they would sneer. When the women patrolled the market together, people would stare at them in their police uniforms and whisper, “Dirty people.”
“I remember the first time we got our uniforms and walked out of the station, an old man passed by me and stopped in his tracks,” Attiya says. The man shook his head in disgust and pinched his earlobes, a gesture to ward off the evil eye. “Shame, shame,” he cried out. “It’s a sign of the Day of Judgement.”
Inside the station the women had to learn not to be seen talking to male colleagues alone—it was the easiest way to become the subject of a rumour about an affair. “You knew that whoever you were seen standing next to alone, there would be a scandal about the two of you,” Attiya says. Male superiors would not call the women into their offices alone, and if they had something to say to them would often use an intermediary to pass on the message. If Attiya or one of the other women complained about a male officer, they knew that the first thing the man would do was attack their character. “It is the greatest weapon they have against us—to say, ‘She’s not a good woman.’ Then they can just sit back and watch the rumour spread throughout the department.”
Attiya was given her first murder case in 2015. She couldn’t sleep for two days after she saw the body. Even today, after having handled roughly thirty homicide cases, she still feels anxious at crime scenes. “When it’s a child, I think of my son,” she says. “If it’s someone’s brother who has been killed, I think of my own.”
When she took charge of Qandeel’s case, she pored over every piece of information she could find. She would wait for her children to go to sleep and comb through Qandeel’s social media pages, her photographs and videos. She watched every interview she could get her hands on. Her children made fun of her obsession and made up a name for it. “Mama has Qandeeliya,” they joked.
Attiya swears she could feel Qandeel’s presence in her home, drifting through each room. “She was a part of my life,” she says. Qandeel wasn’t just another homicide case. The police conducted sweeping raids and picked up dozens of people including members of Qandeel’s extended family, her sister, brother-in-law and cousins. Many had gone into hiding in nearby towns and villages because they feared being caught up in the case.
Attiya would receive constant phone calls from superiors wanting updates on her progress. “This was being talked about internationally, and we were getting calls every day about the case,” she says. The international media coverage tended towards the view that this was a Pakistani woman who had dared to defy the norm and been brutally killed by her own brother. There was pressure to show that the police—and thereby Pakistan—was doing everything possible to bring the killers to justice. “If we [the country] had been trying to make a modern image of ourselves in the world, then that image was being sullied by this case,” Attiya explains. “We wanted people to know that we were pursuing the investigation thoroughly.”
On 17 July, one day after Qandeel’s body was found, her brother Waseem was arrested. According to many reports, he had made no effort to hide and was spotted riding around on his motorbike in Shah Sadar Din’s main market the morning after he fled Multan. CPO Akram promptly held a press conference. He wanted the public to know that the police had been searching for Qandeel’s brother. The murder, he explained, “was probably done on the basis of honour.”12 He announced, first in Urdu and then in English, “And now I would like to tell you that we have arrested Waseem…He has confessed to the crime.” He asked for him to be brought into the room. “I’ve called for Waseem to come here now,” he told the journalists, “so you can have an interview with him.”
A striped purple cloth had been thrown over Waseem’s head and shoulders. As he walked in, CPO Akram repeated, “This is an honour-based murder.” He emphasized that Waseem had been apprehended so quickly because the police had used their “technical and operational teams and all the resources possible” in Dera Ghazi Khan. The forensic samples and autopsy report would also be rushed through a laboratory in Lahore, he said. Qandeel’s body had been found on Saturday morning, and CPO Akram promised to have the forensic results by Monday. For the third time, he said that Waseem had choked and strangled Qandeel for reasons of honour. The only question that remained in the investigation, he seemed to imply, was the extent to which any of Waseem’s friends had been involved in the murder. Even though Waseem had yet to be fully interrogated about why he had strangled his sister and stolen her money and jewellery, the police had no doubt that this was an honour killing.
The journalists r
equested that the police remove the hood covering Waseem’s face and CPO Akram obliged. Every camera in the room zoomed in on him. A dark, slender man, Waseem wore a pale blue shalwar kameez, the sleeves rolled up, and stared nonchalantly at the room. His curly hair, long enough to cover the tops of his ears, was slightly tousled. He was handcuffed.
“I would like to ask all of you, my friends, to ask him questions in a line, so that everyone’s questions can be answered,” CPO Akram requested.
A few reporters rushed forward with microphones. The CPO handed Waseem one of them, which he cradled between his cuffed hands.
“Yes, sir, what did you want to say?” Waseem asked one of the reporters in a thin, reedy voice.
“What’s your name?” a reporter asked.
“Muhammad Waseem.”
“What is your mother’s name?”
“I don’t know my mother’s name.”
“Why did you do this to Qandeel?”
The confession was broadcast live by every channel that had a reporter in the room. “The reason is the way she was coming on Facebook,” Waseem replied. “We Baloch cannot tolerate this.” The reporters pointed out that his sister had been putting photographs and videos on Facebook for six or seven years. Why had Waseem only been angered by them now?
“There were lots of other problems, OK,” Waseem whined. “The problem with the cleric. The media came to our house. That hadn’t happened before. She made it a problem and so I did what I did.”
CPO Akram helped him out. “So apparently what he is trying to say is that ever since she came in the limelight more and more, he felt pressure to do something.”
Waseem said he acted alone. No one in his family had known about his plan.
“How did you kill her?” a reporter called out. “Can you describe it?” Waseem nodded towards CPO Akram. “I did it the way sir described it.”
When asked to elaborate, he explained, “I gave her a tablet and then I strangled her.”
“Are you ashamed?”
“No,” Waseem said, sticking out his chin. “I have no shame. I am Baloch.”
This was a slap in the face to anyone who said he and his sister weren’t Baloch. Hadn’t he shown the kind of honour and self-respect that the Baloch were proud of?
Attiya cannot forget how cool and relaxed Waseem remained throughout the investigation. During his polygraph test he told police officials he had given his parents and his sister sleeping tablets in their milk the night before the murder. On 19 July Regional Police Officer Sultan Azam Temouri told the media Waseem had confessed that “the modern lifestyle adopted by Qandeel came under discussion with [Waseem’s] other siblings many a time and they were all against it.”13 His brother Arif, who lived in Saudi Arabia, had asked him to do something about their shameful sister. Their cousin Haq Nawaz, a man who had been picked up several times for petty crimes, could help him out, Arif suggested. By 26 July, Haq Nawaz had turned himself in to the police in Dera Ghazi Khan, but Attiya says she could find no proof of the conversation between Waseem and Arif. When Arif called his brother, he would do so online. There were no phone records, she says, and by the time she finally found a phone number for Arif, the phone had been turned off.
On 18 July a news report in the Express Tribune quoted Waseem as saying, “I made up my mind to kill [Qandeel] when her controversial video with Mufti Abdul Qavi went viral on social media…I had made up my mind that day, and I was waiting for my sister to come home.” Attiya says she tried to find some shred of evidence connecting Waseem’s actions with Mufti Abdul Qavi and his humiliation after the video of his meeting with Qandeel went viral. “I don’t like Mufti Qavi,” she says bluntly. “But I could never find any connection between him and the brothers. He came for interrogation every single time we asked. He answered all our questions. He gave us his phone willingly. There were no calls to Waseem. Not a single one. I called all the numbers that had called his phone and then Qandeel’s phone.” They belonged to reporters who had called Qandeel and then Mufti Qavi to get a quote or an interview about their meeting in that hotel.
But there are some people in Multan who whisper that Attiya is not as efficient as she seems. In the rambling warren that is the city’s district and sessions court, lawyers huddle together in a small courtyard to discuss the case. A man who claims to have been closely involved with the investigation and the court case says that Attiya deliberately left information out of her investigation report. “She has done nothing,” he says with scorn. “That bitch has done nothing. She has only made things worse.” The police are deliberately hiding links—including phone calls between Mufti Qavi and Qandeel’s brother Arif—because they wish to remain in the cleric’s good books. “Attiya is being dishonest,” he claims. “She’s clearly joined Mufti Qavi. She’s getting his money.”
Waseem did not falter during his interrogation, and the police could not bend the rules too much because they knew the media would pounce on any suggestion of torture. They didn’t want a single bruise on him and so at most kept Waseem standing in a cell or forced him to raise his arms and did not allow him to lower them for hours at a time. Waseem never complained and didn’t seem to care if he was allowed to sleep or not. Attiya tried other tactics. “If you scare them and show them what you have on them, they usually cave,” she says. Waseem wasn’t like that.
“She made our lives very difficult and I had no other solution,” he would say about Qandeel. “She just wouldn’t listen. I told my parents so many times to control her, to get her married. But she just would not listen. I had no other way to deal with this.”
After fourteen days of court-mandated custody, Attiya had one question left for him: Don’t you feel sorry for what you’ve done? She appealed to his emotions. “You and your sister spent your childhood together,” she said. “You must have played together. She was older than you. How did you decide to do this?”
Waseem thought about it briefly. “I do feel sorry,” he replied. “But at the time this was all I could think about doing.”
As she prepares to leave Qandeel’s case behind her, Attiya says she is still not satisfied with the investigation. She believes she did all she could within the limited amount of time specified for the police to submit a report of its findings—extra time was given due to the publicity the case was getting—but she is bitter about the resources and help she was given. “There isn’t the satisfaction of leaving every stone unturned,” she says. “For instance, I’ve only just received a reply from the FIA, three months after I requested its help in finding information about Qandeel’s social media accounts and her WhatsApp chats. The Saudi embassy never got back to us regarding a request to help locate Arif. The State Bank never got back to us about any accounts Qandeel might have had, and we never heard back about any properties she might have owned or rented.”
On the night of 15 July, when Waseem went back to Shah Sadar Din after the murder, he took Qandeel’s phone with him. Waseem had owned a mobile phone shop and so knew how to repair phones, but also how to wipe them. By the time he was arrested, he had erased all the data on Qandeel’s phone and passed a surge of power through it. None of her photographs, videos or messages were retrievable.
Safdar Shah and Qandeel’s parents told Attiya that they had found a laptop and a few diaries in Qandeel’s apartment in Karachi, but these items proved equally useless in providing a thread to follow for the investigation, Attiya says. The diaries were filled with quotes, some poetry and the lyrics to songs. There were scribbled notes reminding Qandeel what to say on her social media pages. Attiya gave them all back to Qandeel’s parents. As far as the police were concerned, these were just scraps of paper. The parents say they have been unable to use the password-protected laptop. Attiya says she searched the laptop but did not find “anything of use” in it.
On 6 December 2016 a judge indicted Waseem, Haq Nawaz and Abdul Basit—accused of driving t
he getaway car on the night of the murder.14 “We have all the forensic evidence we need, DNA reports, a polygraph test and the mobile phone data of the accused,” District Prosecutor Jam Salahuddin told me before the hearings in the case commenced. “They murdered her. They cannot be saved.”
But Attiya isn’t hopeful of the outcome of the trial. “I don’t have faith in the justice system,” Attiya says. “Some judges can be very cooperative, while others are not. The court follows its own will. I’ve seen this with a lot of cases—despite all the evidence, nothing happens.”
As we wrap up our meeting, Attiya says she wants to clarify something. “This case is important to me,” she explains. “It’s important because Qandeel was a human and this should not have happened to her. But I don’t agree with what she was doing.” She is confused by the people who say Qandeel is someone to look up to, and especially by the women who praise her attitude and behaviour. “Qandeel is no role model,” Attiya feels. “To make her a role model for young girls is very wrong. Look, Benazir Bhutto is a role model. She integrated with her society. Did you ever see the dupatta fall from her head? She knew how society thinks of women. We need to consider our society, our religion and a modern way of life equally. Of course women have the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good living standards. You can say you want to be totally unfettered, to have freedom, but is becoming Qandeel Baloch freedom?”
Why did Qandeel have to break so many rules so quickly? Attiya wonders.
When I say that I am surprised by her question, especially when I consider all the rules Attiya says she has broken to reach this point in her career, she explains gently, “Society cannot change so quickly. You need to give it time. Maybe in time it will become how you want it to be. No matter how modern we become, as Muslims we cannot expect to have total freedom to do whatever we like. After all, we won’t live in this world for ever, will we? We will return to Allah and then we will have to answer for all that we have done in this world. So you have to think about that.”