Intrigue, horror sweep Emirates as Oshaxas serial killer claims third victim
By Basim Atuf, Senior Staff Writer
OSHAXAS, ONZA - 44-year-old Shahira Qamar was walking home from her job as a waitress at a busy restaurant in Oshaxas in broad daylight on the 9th when she was apparently abducted. Just a few days later, her mutilated body turned up in a public square several miles away. So far, the lack of witnesses and the apparent failure of public surveillance equipment to capture the abduction or the abandoning of the body have complicated police's investigation into the crime. Nonetheless, they are certain of one thing: this is the Oshaxas Killer's third victim.
Qamar joins a similar cast of two other women: Mumina Jawdat and Mojisola Galila. All three were in their forties, all three were unmarried, and all three worked in restaurants around Oshaxas. Their bodies were also mutilated in similar fashions, with police indicating that all victims have been "horrifically dismembered." Grotesque as the latter is, police have told reporters that the patterns of maiming are apparently a central focus of the investigation, and apparently have some significance.
Tech experts agree that if the cameras were indeed hacked and turned off, as many initially posited, a footprint would be left behind where a manual override was performed and the camera was turned off. "The only way to kill a camera on this network besides physically blocking it or destroying it would be to hack into the system and grant yourself permission to perform a manual override," a spokeswoman for the Oshaxas City Administrator said, paraphrasing a report prepared by an outside security analyst the city hired to aid in the investigation. "Even then, manual overrides are logged in several places -- it would be virtually impossible for a hacker to erase these logs without having a level of familiarity with the system that only a top tier official would possess." Furthermore, the spokeswoman noted, any alterations to the cameras' logs are logged as well.
That was the OCPD's first move. Anyone who ever was connected to the security system, all the way down to the engineers responsible for its design, were brought in for extensive questioning. Police cleared everybody connected, and concluded that external hacking was not the cause of the lack of working surveillance, and that the malfunctions must have been purely coincidental. "It's difficult for us to say this, but all the evidence says that the malfunctioning equipment stopped working when it did solely as a coincidence," OCPD Chief for Oshaxas Katleho Rashad said -- to jeers -- at the time.
It's unclear if the police still maintain that position in light of the camera's failing again for the most recent abduction, but sources within the department have confirmed to the Chronicle that the officers leading the investigation are revising their approach considerably, and possibly appealing to outside resources.
"We cannot have people afraid to walk the streets in broad daylight," National Assemblyman Khaled Latif told reporters this morning as he urged for calm among his constituents. "Onza is known for being a safe nation. The recent killings do not change that. But we didn't earn that reputation by being soft on crime. The OCPD must find this man and bring him to justice immediately," he said.
Sources noted that the department put little priority on investigating the first murder, given the victim's lack of family and the particularly challenging lack of evidence. Since the second one, however, detectives have been "working double and triple overtime shifts," one source noted, "to put this [expletive] behind bars."
"It boggles the mind," noted former police investigator and true crime writer Youssef Olufunke. "On one hand, the killer appears crude. He abducts helpless women who he knows can be missing for days before missing persons reports are filed. Then he kills and mutilates them and dumps their body somewhere public where they will quickly be discovered. But then you consider the dynamic of sophisticated camera hacking and broad-daylight abduction -- are the women willingly going with the killer? Is there an accomplice? There just isn't enough to go off," he said.
In the meantime, President Ihejirika Chirped a message of support to the country, insisting that citizens are safe and that the perpetrator will be brought to justice. "The OCPD is a resourceful bunch," the President said in one of the Chirps, "I have full confidence that they will ensure that justice is served."
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