‘You won’t be able to escape, I will kill you’ says Mayra’s alleged killer

A 24-year-old girl, Mayra Zulfiqar, was found dead in Lahore on Monday. She had recently been threatened by two men who both wanted to marry her.

Prior to her brutal murder, she had asked police for protection after accusing a man of abducting her at gunpoint.

In Pakistan, the chief investigating officer in the murder inquiry told the BBC that police teams were targeting addresses in Islamabad and Lahore. So far no arrest had been made.

In a police report filed before her murder, Ms Zulfiqar named and accused a man of abducting her at gunpoint and attempting to sexually assault her.

She said she managed to run away by alerting people around but the man threatened her, saying “You won’t be able to escape, I will kill you.”

Mayra’s uncle Mohammad Nazeer found her body after receiving a phone call from her father, who lives in London, to say she had been killed.

The initial postmortem report said that Mayra had received two bullets, one to her neck and another to her arm.

Mayra Zulfiqar’s funeral took place in Lahore, while a special memorial service has been held at a mosque in Hounslow, west London. Her brother Faizan Muhammad said his father had left for Pakistan

The deceased woman had arrived from the UK, where her family is settled, some two months back and shared the upper portion of the rented house with a friend. Police have taken her housemate into custody as part of the probe.

Late on Monday, Defence-B police registered a First Information Report (FIR) against two purported friends of Mayra on murder charges on the complaint of the deceased woman’s uncle.

In a statement, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office said, “our thoughts are with the family at this difficult time. We are urgently seeking more information from the local authorities.”