A Pakistani television anchor was found shot dead in her bedroom on Sunday. By Monday, a court had given police two days to question her husband, who was in the house when she died and who, according to a worker in the home, said the gun went off by accident.
Rabia Ahsan, 41, was an anchor and programme host with the private channel 92 News and had co-hosted a current affairs show alongside senior journalists Amir Mateen and Rauf Klasra. She was found dead on Sunday afternoon at her home in the Gulshanabad area of Rawalpindi, with a gunshot wound below her neck.
Rawalpindi’s city police officer, Hassan Mushtaq Sukhera, went to the scene with forensic teams. The Punjab Forensic Science Agency recovered a .30 bore pistol and ammunition from the house. A case of murder under Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code was registered on the complaint of her brother, Khurram Ahmed.
Her husband, Ahsan Tahir Khan, a deputy director at the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation, was taken into custody. A male domestic worker told police that Khan said the shot had been fired accidentally. On Monday, an area magistrate granted police a two day physical remand, which means officers can hold and question him for two days before bringing him back to court.
Khan has not been convicted of anything, and the investigation is at its beginning. Police say they are working from the scene evidence and the forensic findings. Ahsan was a mother of two daughters.
The killing has drawn attention well beyond Rawalpindi because the victim was a working journalist, and because the first accounts of how she died come from the people who were inside the house. What the forensic work shows, and what Khan tells investigators during the remand, will shape where the case goes next.
Transparency note: This story is based on Dawn’s reporting and the Rawalpindi police chief’s on record statements. One claim circulating in weaker reports, that the husband confessed, is not carried here because it is unverified and conflicts with the accidental discharge account reported from the scene. He is a suspect in a registered case, and the presumption of innocence applies.
