UK police have arrested five people, including three women, in connection with an arson attack that claimed the lives of the wife of a Pakistani-origin neurosurgeon and their three children in Leicester.
Leicester police said that three women, aged 19, 20 and 27, and two men, aged 49 and 19, have been detained in connection with the attack.
Details of the arrests came shortly after police said that those who died in the fire at their home in Wood Hill, Leicester, early on Friday - Shehnila Taufiq, who was in her 40s, her 19-year-old daughter, Zainab, and two sons, Jamal, aged 17, and 15-year-old Bilal - had no connection to the death of a man attacked in a nearby street the previous day.
It is thought that the property was targeted by mistake in a revenge attack following the earlier incident, in which Antoin Akpom, a coach and former player at Leicester Nirvana Football Club, was killed, the Guardian reported.
Muhammad Taufiq al-Sattar, who flew back to Leicester from Ireland, where he works as a neurosurgeon, said: "I deeply miss my beautiful wife and three beautiful children. What has happened has happened, and nothing can be reversed, but I hope justice prevails and, in future, this should not happen to any family in the UK.
Leicestershire police's Assistant Chief Constable Roger Bannister said in a statement: "While we are investigating links between the two crimes, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest those who died in the fire, or indeed anyone else who lives in that property, was involved in the assault.
"Because of the close proximity - in terms of time and location - of the two incidents, it is right that we look at whether there are links between the two crimes.
"However, at this stage in our investigations we have found nothing to suggest the residents of the house devastated by the fire had anything to do with the [earlier] Kent Street incident."
Neighbours of the family, who are originally from Pakistan, reacted with disbelief to the idea that they could have been intentionally killed, and said they might not have been the intended target.
"Most people feel this was meant for somebody else and they got the wrong house," a middle-aged man, who did not want to be named, told the paper.
