A special team has been set up to hunt for the former husband of a British woman whose death in Pakistan last week is being treated as a potential “honour” killing, police said on Wednesday.

Mohammad Shakeel fled the village of Pandori, 80km south of Islamabad, soon after a complaint was lodged with police on Saturday accusing him and other family members of murdering his former wife Samia Shahid.

It is alleged that Shahid, 28, had been tricked into travelling to Pakistan and killed for marrying against the wishes of her family.

On Wednesday, some of the most senior policemen in the Punjab province, as well as agents from Pakistan’s military intelligence agency the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, descended on Pandori and searched two of the cluster of houses where the extended family live.

The case, which has been highlighted by the Bradford West MP Naz Shah, has become a priority after Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, announced that he had ordered a rapid investigation.

Also under suspicion is Shahid’s father, Mohammad, who told police he discovered his daughter’s body, with vomit around her mouth, in Shakeel’s house on Wednesday 20 July.

Wisal Fakhar Sultan, the regional police officer for Rawalpindi, said police were investigating whether Shahid had killed herself, accidentally taken an overdose or been deliberately poisoned.

Tablets and mobile phones were taken from Shakeel’s house and a forensics laboratory in Lahore has been ordered to speed up analysis of samples taken from Shahid’s body.

One officer told the Guardian it was likely she had been deliberately poisoned. He said bruising had been found on her neck and shoulders, contradicting earlier statements by the police. Officials said Shahid’s cousin Mobeen, her sister Madiha and her mother Imtiaz Bibi were all also under investigation.

Shahid’s father was briefly arrested on Monday night but later released following the intervention of a local politician. Mujahid Khan, a senior officer from the local district of Jhelum, said her father was “under strict surveillance” and that his passport had been confiscated to stop him from leaving the country.

Mohammad Shahid told the Guardian he had attempted to call Shakeel to ask him to give himself up to the police but had not been able to get through.

“My daughter was living with her husband Shakeel and I used to visit her every day,” he said. “I went as usual on Wednesday and I found her lying on the stairs. Shakeel and all of the rest of the family were in my home next door.”

The imposing compounds searched by police on Tuesday are some the largest houses in Pandori, where Mohammad Shahid enjoys prestige as the wealthy owner of a Bradford curry house. Police have struggled to find any neighbours to help them with their inquiries who are not family members.

The family insist Shahid was married to Shakeel, a first cousin, and police in Pakistan say they have not received any documents proving otherwise.

In fact, she divorced him in a UK sharia court in 2014 and then remarried a man called Syed Mukhtar Kazam after taking the incendiary step of converting to Shi’ism, a different sect to the Sunni faith of her family.

Friends of Shahid in the UK said the family felt so dishonoured by her behaviour that they did not acknowledge she had remarried.

West Yorkshire police last year warned a member of Shahid’s family in Bradford for harassing her. She had returned home from Dubai, where she had been living with her new husband, and hoped to reconcile with her relatives, but was so afraid of them that she asked a female police officer to accompany her to the family home in Manningham. Even in the presence of the police officer, one relative abused her and was given an official harassment warning, police said.

Kazam was so concerned about her safety that he tried to prevent her visiting Pakistan to see her family last week after she received messages saying her father was extremely unwell. He flew to Pakistan after learning of her death to lodge a complaint with police.

On Wednesday, a 37-year-old man and 32-year-old woman were in custody in Bradford in connection to alleged threats made against Shah, the MP who raised the alarm about the case, West Yorkshire police said.

Shah said she could not comment on the nature of threats allegedly made to her, but said she had been called by police to discuss her security arrangements.



She said she had received a briefing from the Pakistani authorities on Wednesday to say that the interior minister was overseeing the case personally.



“I was told that the case is now under his watch and he has assigned two of his most senior and capable officers to the investigation,” she said

“I feel reassured by this development because the investigation has gone from them basically doing nothing and saying they were just waiting for the forensic tests to come back to them treating it as a potential murder investigation. I am determined to see justice done.”