The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, June 13, 2007
OMAR EL AKKAD AND SONYA FATAH
TORONTO and NEW DELHI — A Pakistani state minister resigned yesterday after he was named a suspect in the sudden death of Canadian businesswoman Kafila Siddiqui.
Muhammad Shahid Jamil Qureshi submitted his resignation as minister of state for communications after police confiscated a number of items from his home in a leafy Islamabad neighbourhood on Monday night. A police search of the home also exposed more inconsistencies in the troubling case of Ms. Siddiqui’s death.
Mr. Qureshi has not been arrested, but he has been placed on Pakistan’s exit control list to prevent him from fleeing the country.
Pakistani authorities had received a request from the Canadian government via Interpol, seeking information about Ms. Siddiqui’s whereabouts. A Pakistani Interior Ministry official said that police had gone to the minister’s house at the time, but were told that he was living there alone. However, subsequent police interrogations with 12 members of Mr. Qureshi’s domestic staff revealed that Ms. Siddiqui did reside in the house.
Staff at Mr. Qureshi’s residence told police that while they were aware of Ms. Siddiqui’s presence, they hardly interacted with her and were not allowed into her room, a source close to the investigation said.
Mr. Qureshi told The Globe and Mail on Monday night that Ms. Siddiqui had been renting the lower floor of his home for several months.
He said she had gone on a starvation diet prior to her death, eating only dates and drinking holy water.
After searching Mr. Qureshi’s property, however, police confirmed that Ms. Siddiqui’s room was in the upper storey of the house where Mr. Qureshi resided.
Ms. Siddiqui’s husband, Suleman Qaiser, as well as her brother, Mustafa Qayyum, had been trying to reach her for months. Finally, Mr. Qaiser contacted Canadian authorities and Interpol for assistance.
“We forwarded that request to Islamabad police,” Brigadier Javed Cheema, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said.
That prompted a police visit to Mr. Qureshi’s house, which was ultimately fruitless. Brig. Cheema said police continued to monitor the house, but never caught sight of Ms. Siddiqui.
Questions abound about Mr. Qureshi’s relationship with the 40-year-old businesswoman. Mr. Qureshi earlier told The Globe that he and Ms. Siddiqui were not business partners. Yet Canadian corporate records show that a person with the same name is listed as a co-director of two Ontario-based companies, along with Ms. Siddiqui.
In Toronto, Ms. Siddiqui’s former business mentor described her as honest, hardworking and in a loving relationship with her husband.
“She was sincere and extremely ambitious,” business consultant Bikram Lamba said in an interview. “She was almost too ambitious, to be frank.”
Mr. Lamba first met Ms. Siddiqui four years ago at a Canadian International Development Agency conference. Since then, he said, she relied on him regularly for advice on myriad projects she dreamed of starting.While she originally worked in the pharmaceutical industry like her husband, Ms. Siddiqui decided to move into consulting, Mr. Lamba said. He said she moved to Pakistan in part because her younger sister was running a business there, but Ms. Siddiqui did not believe her sister was “aggressive enough” to get things done.
The last time Mr. Lamba saw Ms. Siddiqui was in 2006, when she visited Canada. He said she showed no signs of depression or of a dispute with her husband. On numerous occasions, Mr. Lamba said, Ms. Siddiqui talked about an old college friend who was helping her with her business dealings in Pakistan: Mr. Qureshi.
“She never said anything negative about him,” Mr. Lamba said.
Ms. Siddiqui’s family members allege she was being kept at the minister’s home against her will for several months. But Mr. Qureshi insists the family’s jealousy of Ms. Siddiqui’s success and the financial pressure they exerted on her led to her death.
Ms. Siddiqui’s body was buried in a graveyard in North Karachi yesterday. It may be a week before her autopsy results are in, and Mr. Qureshi’s fate depends in large part on what those results reveal.
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