Bob Woolmer Murder – Hanger-Oners Wanted
“WANTED BY WOOLMER COPS,” announces the Mirror’s front page.
Readers who had expected the Cricket World Cup to be about palm trees, sunburnt necks and women in conch-shell bikini tops instead see grainy images of three men.
The trio are, in no special order, Jundi Khan, Hamed Malik and Erfan Chaudhary. They are the “three hanger-on fans”.
Can there be a worse epithet to go by? There is nothing admirable in being a hanger-oner. At least stalker suggests a motive.
Thus labelled it would not surprise us if the three never surfaced again, remaining holed up in some suburban bedroom, secreted beneath an official Pakistan duvet cover and talking about the great days of Imran Khan’s hair by the light of a torch fashioned from, well, Imran Khan’s hair. Innocent men guilty only of liking cricket as much as tabloid readers like football.
“They hung around team for days..now they’re vanished,” says a headline further inside the paper.
“Fans vanish after murder,” says the Sun. They “vanished” the day Bob Woolmer died.
Do you know where the vanishing fans are? Study the picture. Jamaica’s deputy police commissioner Mark Shields says: “We are looking for them to eliminate them from inquiries.”
One of the three, Hamed Malik, is based in the UK. Chaudhary is believed to be back at his home in New York. And there is a fourth man. He’s called Tariq Milk. He lives in Jamaica. And he has come forward to help the police.
But before we condemn the men in their absence, the Sun wonders is they are the guilty parties. Perhaps – just perhaps – Woolmer was killed by a “silent assassin”.
Shields of the Yardies says it wasn’t a local killer, at least he thinks not. “The fact at it was manual strangulation, asphyxiation, doesn’t really fit the profile,” says he. “One would tend to find either firearms or knives as the favoured weapons.”
So we are back to the missing trio. “CRICKET MURDER: BRITISH SUSPECT ON RUN,” says the Star’s front page. This is, of course, more then presumptuous, it being far less than certain that Hamed Malik is running anywhere. Indeed, as a fan of a failed team – Pakistan are out of the World Cup – he may be expected to find a dark corner to weep in.
And we have yet to see the CCTV footage of the corridor at the Pegasus hotel, scene of Bob Woolmer’s murder.
Do the missing three feature? Are they fielding as the corridor is used for late-night cricket practice, a carpeted wicket?
As yet, we do not know. But, as with so much cricket and sport, we’ll amuse ourselves during the breaks in play…
Posted: 27th, March 2007 | In: Back pages Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
