Samia Shahid's first husband confesses to murder: police sources

JHELUM: Samia Shahid’s first husband confessed to strangulating her to death, police sources confirmed.

“I strangled Samia to death using a dupatta,” Chaudhry Shakeel said in a statement recorded with the police, sources said.

Samia’s cousin Chaudhry Mubeen who was also a suspect in the murder case is innocent, sources added.

In July Samia, originally from Bradford, went to visit her father in a village called “Poteh” near Dina on July 14. Her family, who are also British nationals, were in Pakistan following a bereavement within the family.

She was found dead on July 20, in mysterious circumstances.

Samia Shahid’s family insisted she died of a heart attack. Later they changed their statement to claim that she had committed suicide.

Samia Shahid’s husband Syed Mukhtar Kazam insisted that she was the victim of a so-called honour killing because she had rebelled against wishes of the family, divorced her first husband Muhammad Shakeel and married him in Bradford in 2014.

A month after investigations into the case, Samia Shahid’s family refused to accept her second marriage and declared Mukhtar Kazam a fraud.

After the case gathered international attention Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif took notice.

A postmortem report on July 28 declared the victim’s neck had a 9 cm long and 5 cm wide wound. Before she died her nose and mouth had bled. The cause of her death was not a heart attack in fact she was choked to death.