Muhammad Arslan has been jailed in the U.K for suffocating one of his female colleagues with a face mask and then hiding her body in a suitcase, Geo News reports.
Arslan, 27, claimed to have forced a face mask into the mouth of 21-year-old Hina Bashir in order to “quieten” her after he confronted her over alleged nude photographs that had been sent out. The prosecution rejected his explanation as “elaborate and concocted”, asserting he had killed Hina out of anger and jealousy.
Both Arslan and Hina had grown up together in the same village in Faisalabad. Arslan would try to approach Hina romantically, but she rejected his advances. Within months of her moving to the UK in November 2021, Arslan followed her.
On the eve of July 11 last year, Hina and two of her friends visited Arslan’s shared flat in Ilford, east London, in order to collect some belongings she had left there while she was moving. Hina went up alone, and that was the last time her friends saw her alive, Geo reports.
Arslan admitted manslaughter on the first day of his trial but denied murder and concealing Hina’s body. However, a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty on all charges.
Judge Richard Marks KC sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 20 years for the murder and five years running concurrently for his heinous crime.
The judge told Arslan: “I am satisfied…that your unrequited feelings for Hina boiled over and resulted in you taking hold of a facemask and forcing it into the back of her mouth which led to her collapse and ultimately to her death from asphyxiation.”
He added that Arslan’s prime motivation was to save himself after killing Hina, hence the “campaign of lies” to conceal his crime, before disposing of her body in a “shocking and callous manner”. Arslan had hid her body in a suitcase overnight, before traveling to an industrial estate to hide the suitcase in undergrowth on the side of a lane, evidence reveals.
The Judge declared it was apparent that Arslan had been “obsessed” with Hina, feelings clearly not reciprocated. He went on to say that he was extremely skeptical of the claim that he had been sent naked photos of Hina prior to the attack, as “no such photos were ever recovered”.
In an interview with Geo, the victim’s father, Bashir Khan, stated, “even animals would treat my daughter better.”
