The son of late Saira Naseer, a provincial women's wing leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F), on Thursday, along with his wife, confessed to killing his mother on the pretext of 'honour'.

Both the son, Fahad Ali, and his wife, Sadaf Sarhandi, are currently in police custody.

Earlier this month, police had found Naseer's charred remains in her burnt car. She had been identified by her daughters by the rings removed from the car. The police believe that she had been murdered before being set alight.

Speaking at a crowded press conference in Hyderabad, the couple said they killed the PML-F activist because of her "character".

See: Slain Saira’s family not satisfied with probe

Fahad was arrested on Wednesday night after being summoned to Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Pir Mohammad Shah's house along with his father, Zaheer and stepsisters, Hina and Sana. He was separated and taken into custody while his family members were allowed to go.

“I spoke to Fahad Ali and confronted with him with the evidence which we had gathered so far and he subsequently confessed to the murder. Then he recounted how it happened around midnight on December 6-7,” said SSP Shah.

The SSP said that he had personally supervised the investigation of the case, during which he analysed "thousands of pages" of cellphone records and studied the movements of an unspecified vehicle. He claimed that one detail in particular had helped him resolve the mystery surrounding the murder.

Explaining, SSP Shah said that the clue was the location of Fahad's mobile phone at his mother's Defence Phase-II residence at the time he received two messages from his father, Zaheer, who himself had been present in Latifabad at the time. Secondly, he said, the movement of Sadaf’s footprints in Naseer's house that night had been "abnormal", identifying which helped greatly in the investigation.

The SSP said police had also visited the crime scene, where eyewitnesses had told them they had seen a young man and a woman near a burnt car.

“Both the man and the woman, who were sweating profusely on a cold night, had taken water from a nearby dhaba [roadside restaurant] and then consumed more water from another dhaba,” the SSP said.

Shah pointed out that the location of Fahad’s mobile belied his oft-repeated alibi: that he had left his car at his mother's house around 4pm on December 6 and returned at 9pm again to get some money, as he was to travel to Karachi early morning on December 7.

In fact, the couple had been living at Naseer's house since November 20 after reconciling with the mother, who had initially objected to Fahad’s marriage with Sadaf, he said.

“On Wednesday night, when I showed Fahad his mobile phone’s location in the Defence area where he received two messages at 11:30pm and 11:36pm, he [Fahad] started to sweat, because he had initially insisted that he was at his flat in Latifabad [at the time of the murder]. He had claimed he had slept early that night because he was to leave for Karachi on Dec 7, and had therefore replied to those messages at 4:30am," the police officer said.

"In order to reconstruct the crime scene, we also took him [Fahad] to the restaurant where he and his wife had drunk water,” he said.

“He initially said he did this on the pretext of honour, and then said he had hit her with a blunt object once [without intent to kill], but it proved fatal for the victim as she fell from the impact,” the SSP said.

He said that gasoline available in the house where the murder took place had been used by Fahad to torch the car after shifting his mother's body into it and taking it to a desolated place in the Husri area.

“I am confessing it before police that we have done it,” Fahad said at the press conference. His wife, Sadaf, meanwhile said that they had torched the car only to frame it as an accident, but hadn't realised that the fire would be that massive.

“Fahad did it [killed Naseer] in a fit of anger after seeing his mother’s pictures and videos. He had given up the company of his friends because of his mother’s character, as his friends used to say different things," his wife said.

She alleged that Naseer used to say that she was an independent person and would spend her life whatever way she deemed fit, which irked her son.

"Fahad avoided [the situation] on many occasions, but for how long can it be avoided," she said.