By Staff Reporter
RAWALPINDI: The story investigators were first given was a burglary gone wrong. A frantic call to police. A household ransacked. A woman found dead.
Four days later, that account has collapsed into something far darker, and far more familiar to advocates who track violence against women in Pakistan: a case in which the household’s own domestic worker has now told police, in one of three shifting accounts, that he helped strangle his employer’s wife during a marital dispute — and in which forensic examiners have documented injuries that read less like the aftermath of a robbery than the record of a sustained assault.
Hina Javed, 45, was found dead Thursday morning in the bathroom of a second-floor apartment at Askari Apartments in Rawalpindi’s Lalkurti neighborhood, according to a First Information Report. Her hands had been bound behind her back. A piece of cloth had been pressed into her mouth. A wire was fastened around her neck and tied to the shower rod.
By Monday, police sources said, one of the two men in custody had confessed to a role in her death — though not without contradicting himself along the way.
A confession, told three ways
The domestic worker, identified in police accounts as Zeeshan, was taken into custody alongside Javed’s husband, Faisal Asghar Imam, and has since given investigators three separate versions of what happened inside the apartment, according to police sources.
In his first statement, Zeeshan claimed he had killed Javed as part of a plan devised with Imam. In a second account, he said he had acted alone. In a third, he told investigators he had been summoned during a dispute between the couple and had assisted Imam.
That third version, the one police sources described as his most recent, holds that Zeeshan was called in during a marital argument, that Javed tried to flee, and that when she resisted being restrained, he pressed his hand against her throat. He also acknowledged, separately, that he had been stealing from the household for some time, according to police sources.
Both Imam and Zeeshan were produced before a duty magistrate on Sunday, who ordered them held on three-day physical remand. Rawalpindi City Police Officer Hassan Mushtaq Sukhera has assembled a seven-member investigation team headed by SSP Investigation Saif Ullah, and police sources said mobile phones belonging to Javed and the three household members have been seized as evidence. A rope and a length of wire, allegedly used in the killing, have also been recovered from the suspects.
The burglary story that didn’t hold
The case against Imam and his household began to take shape almost immediately after Javed’s body was found. Her brother, Fahad Javed Malik, said their father received a call around 6:53 p.m. that Thursday informing him of an emergency at the apartment. When Malik arrived, he found his sister dead in the bathroom, bound and gagged, the wire around her neck run through to the shower fixture.
Police said the household had first framed the death as the work of intruders — that thieves had broken into the apartment. That account did not hold. A murder case was formally registered at Civil Lines police station on Aug. 20, under Sections 302 and 34 of the Pakistan Penal Code, covering premeditated murder and acts carried out by multiple people with shared intent, on a complaint filed by Malik.
The complaint names three people: Imam, his father, retired official Asghar Ali Fayyaz, and Zeeshan. Javed had married Imam in November of last year. The FIR alleges she was subjected to repeated physical and psychological abuse in the months that followed, and Malik has told police that Imam’s first marriage also ended in divorce amid allegations of domestic violence.
Fayyaz, the father-in-law, has been named in the complaint but has not been arrested. The family has pressed for his detention, and for a transparent accounting of his role. Police have recorded a statement from him as part of the broader inquiry.
What the autopsy found
Javed’s postmortem report, conducted roughly 12 hours after her death, documented a fractured neck bone along with injury marks on her ribs and hip. The examination, performed by Dr. Maria Khalid, found that the membrane surrounding her heart was filled with blood, with Lady Constable Rafia Tabassum collecting forensic samples at the scene. An anatomical diagram prepared as part of the exam recorded a ligature mark roughly 27 centimeters in length around her neck.
Despite those findings, examiners have not yet been able to establish a definitive cause of death. DNA and other samples have been forwarded to a forensics laboratory, and investigators say the results are expected to help establish what happened in the apartment in Javed’s final moments. Police initially told the examining physician that Javed had been hanged by her husband — an account the preliminary autopsy did not bear out.
A professor who lectured on the subject
Among the details that have unsettled investigators most is Imam’s own background. He has taught at several universities, and videos of his lectures that have surfaced online show him discussing, on more than one occasion, cases of husbands who killed their wives.
Javed’s father-in-law told police in an initial statement that friction between the couple began not long after the wedding. Police have since barred him from leaving the city while the investigation continues.
The killing has moved well beyond a single police station. First Lady Aseefa Bhutto Zardari called Sunday for a “swift and transparent” investigation, urging the Punjab government to ensure a thorough probe and to hold those responsible accountable for what her office described as a brutal killing. A statement from the President Secretariat Media Wing said she had extended condolences to Javed’s family.
The case was also raised on the floor of the National Assembly, where Speaker Ayaz Sadiq called Javed’s death a matter of concern and thanked the chamber’s Women’s Caucus for bringing it forward. He noted that Javed had worked in Parliament on an NITB project, and directed that the Human Rights and Interior committees examine the case alongside the caucus.
Law Minister Azam Nazir Tarar said he had reached out to Punjab officials and police as soon as he learned of the case and had obtained details from investigators. “This matter will be brought to its logical conclusion,” he said, adding that the government would extend full cooperation to the committees reviewing it, at the Speaker’s direction.
Javed’s death has become a rallying point online, with the hashtag #JusticeForHina circulating widely as public figures and activists have pressed for accountability. The case has stirred broader outrage over gender-based violence in Pakistan, where activists have long argued that domestic abuse cases move too slowly through the courts, and too often end without consequence.
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