BAHAWALPUR: The Saddar police recovered bodies of a 30-year-old woman and her five-year-old daughter from the Ahmedpur Canal branch on Wednesday night.

According to police, Muhammad Azeem, the father of deceased Uzma, said in his statement on Thursday that his daughter had celebrated the fifth birthday of her daughter, Abba, on Tuesday night.

He said he did not know what had happened to his daughter and his granddaughter the next day.

Police said Usama Jamshed, the husband of Uzma, was in Dubai.

Police were still clueless whether Uzma committed suicide along with her daughter or some person(s) drowned them in the canal which was several kilometres away from her village in Yazman.

However, police said the postmortem report might help resolve the mystery deaths.

MASTER PLAN: On the direction of the government, the district administration will chalk out a master plan for city’s beautification for the next 20 years.

A meeting of local officials with Punjab government’s senior master planner Sania Zara was held here on Thursday with DCO Imran Sikandar Baloch in the chair.

The meeting decided that every government department, including health, education, industry, agriculture and tourism, besides City and Sadder tehsil municipal administrations would formulate their own plan which would be reviewed and integrated in the main city’s master plan.

The meeting said the tendency to convert the agricultural land into housing colonies should be checked because it was creating a lot of problems.

ICE: With the continuous rise in temperature, the ice sellers in the city are cashing in on the situation and are selling the ice at exorbitant prices.

The consumers have complained that the ice is being sold between Rs20 and Rs40 per kilo while an ice block is available for Rs820 instead of Rs500 in the open market.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2014