I can still remember the chill I felt on first hearing of the murders of Parveen Khan and her three young children, Aqsa, Kamran and Imran. It was July 1981. In the middle of the night, someone had poured petrol through the letter box of their house in Walthamstow, north-east London, and set it alight. The only person to escape the inferno was Parveen’s husband, Yunus, who had jumped from an upstairs window, his injuries leaving him hospitalised for several weeks.
The perpetrators were never caught. Don Gibson was one of the investigating officers. Now, as then, he insists the arsonist was most likely Yunus Khan himself. For this to be true, observes Pete Hope, a firefighter who attended the scene, Khan must have gone out of the house, poured petrol through the letter box, come inside, set the petrol ablaze, gone upstairs, waited until the fire made escape almost impossible and then thrown himself out of a window.
