LAHORE, June 20: A factory worker on Tuesday killed his three minor daughters before confessing to police, prompting a policeman to shoot him dead in the lock-up in Liaqatabad.

Tension caused by poverty, according to the worker, forced him to take the extreme step.

“I really regret it, although I did not have any other option,” Muhammad Ashraf, 38, said after he, together with the crime-weapon, surrendered to Liaqatabad police. “I had learnt over the time that I would never be able to generate enough resources to give an honourable life to my daughters.”

Ashraf said he, his wife Sughra Bibi and daughters — Iqra, 9, Sumaira, 5 and Eisha, 3 — were asleep in a room on the upper floor of his house when he decided to do what he did.

“I picked up my daughters one by one from their cots, took each of them to the courtyard of the house and slaughtered them,” Ashraf said, adding that his two elder daughters did not put up any resistance but it was difficult to kill the youngest one.

“Eisha kept on begging for her life. She did not blink her eyes even for once. She asked me why was I holding a knife and why had I brought her to the courtyard. I had no answer.”

He said he once thought of leaving her unhurt, but then “I thought it would make her life more miserable.” After growing up, she would be known as daughter of a killer and sister of two slain girls.

“Time had been killing me every second. Sometimes it so happened that I thought if I would die any moment. I thought about the future of my daughters after I am dead. And I thought why shouldn’t I kill them before I die,” he told a senior police officer, who visited him in the lock-up.

His wife told police that he woke her up at 6 am, took bath and changed clothes. “He then told me that he had murdered all his daughters.”

She said Ashraf used to take drugs but had given up for some time.

Then he started taking some pills. He used to get tense and would often talk about his insufficient resources to raise his daughters.

The man was shot dead by a guard of DIG Operations Aamir Zulfikar in the police lock-up. The DIG had gone to the police station to interrogate the accused.

When the DIG left the station, his guard Nadeem Rafiq Raja did not board his squad van. He went back to the station and opened fire on the worker, who suffered critical injuries and died instantaneously.

“I just did my duty. I have eliminated a beast. The beast had no right to live among human beings. No human being can kill his own children,” Raja said in his statement.

“I have a three-year-old daughter. It (the incident) was just like killing my daughter. I had decided to kill the beast when I was listening to his statement before the DIG,” he added.

The DIG said a murder case had been registered against the guard.

The bodies have been taken to the city mortuary for autopsy.

AP adds: Ashraf’s wife Sughra Bibi told reporters that she did not hear her daughters’ cries and that her husband had woken her up after “committing the heinous crime for which I will never forgive him”.