The residents of Kasarvadavli village in Thane woke up to a horrific sight of a woman in blood soaked clothes, her throat slit, begging for help. She was trying to escape from her brother who had killed 14 members of his family.
Hasnen Anwar Warekar (35), allegedly killed his wife, two kids, four sisters, parents and six of his nephews and nieces with a butcher’s knife before committing suicide by hanging himself.
The sole survivor of the massacre is Hasnen’s 22-year-old sister Subiya, whose screams roused the neighbours and brought the police to their doorstep. It is with the help of traumatized Subiya, who has received 25 stitches on her neck, that the police is trying to reconstruct the sequence of events eading to the midnight killings.
On Saturday, Hasnen had invited his three sisters and their children home for dinner. While no specific occasion was cited, he insisted that everybody joins him at his house. “Subiya, who stays in Koparkhairne, initially refused to join them since her daughter, Arsiya (5 months), was unwell. But he went to her house and picked her up and would not take a ‘no’ for an answer,” said a relative of the family.
It is suspected that Hasnen, an accountant, had laced their food with a sedative and slashed their necks after they went to bed, all of them having decided to spend the night at the house.
Incidentally, all of them retired to different rooms with Hasnen and his family going to sleep upstairs, the parents in the hall area and the sisters in another bedroom on the ground floor. Preliminary investigation by the Thane police suggests that Hasnen had procured a butcher’s cleaver used for sacrificing animals during festivals and killed his wife and children first. He then came downstairs and killed his parents before proceeding to kill his sisters and their children.
What has baffled the police is the apparent lack of motive as Hasnen was known to be a quiet and unassuming person with no known mental ailment. One of the theories doing the rounds is the possibility of the massacre being a ritual slaying which possibly had something to do with the accountant’s skewed understanding of the concept of ‘qurbani.’ Hasnen worked with a private company in Mumbai and had no known financial troubles or disputes.
Hasnen stayed with his wife Jabin (28), two kids — Mubashira (6) and Humaira (3 months) — in a two storey house in Kasarvadavli villa off Ghodbunder Road. His parents — Anwar Warekar (55) and Asagadi (50) and an unmarried sister Batul Warekar (30) — also stayed with him. Three sisters — Subiya Bharmal (22), Maria Fakhi (28) and Sabeena Khan (35) — were married and stayed elsewhere in the city.
At around 2.30 am, a neighbour heard the sound of a vessel being struck on a window. When she checked it out, she heard a faint scream; the alert neighbour roused others in the cluster who rescued Subiya after breaking open a window grill.
“Subiya was standing at the window sill on the ground floor: her clothes were soaked in blood and she was screaming for help. When we tried to open the front door, she warned us that her brother Hasnen was out there with a knife and he had killed everybody in the house; also, that he was trying to kill her too. She asked us to break open the window grill and get her out,” said one of the rescuers giving a graphic account.
Sources claim that after Hasnen slit Subiya’s throat, he killed her five-month-old daughter in front of her. She also saw her one of her sisters and their children’s throat being slit. “She did not succumb to her injuries like the others and pretended to be dead; after he left the room, she dragged herself to the bedroom and managed to lock it from the inside. She then started hurling vessels on the window to wake up the neighbours,” said a relative.
Some of the neighbours, who tried getting into the house through another window, claim that they saw Hasnen allegedly roaming around the house with a knife. “He was alive when we got Subiya out. But five minutes later, when we tried to enter through the kitchen window, we saw him hanging from the ceiling fan with the bloodied knife in his hand,” said Farzan, a childhood friend of Hasnen. The police were alerted and they broke open the front door.
“There was blood everywhere – splattered on the walls, on the floor, on bed-sheets. It was horrific,” said an officer who first reached the house.
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