In the latest incident of Honor-Killing, a Pakistani couple was murdered in Lahore for marrying without their family’s consent. This happened just days after another teenager was reportedly burned to death by her own mother for a similar reason.
Muhammad Ashraf of Lahore killed his own daughter, Saba, and her newly wed husband, Karamat Ali, just a day after the couple had returned to the Kahna area of Lahore to patch things up with the girl’s family. A local police official, Falek Sher, reported the following regarding the incident.
“Eighteen-year-old Saba had married Karamat Ali, who is 35, around a year and a half ago against the will of her family and returned to her home on Thursday night to settle matters with father and other family members.”
Following a heated conversation with his son in law, 56 year old Ashraf opened fire on both Saba & Karamat, instantly killing them. He also reportedly killed the neighbor, Muhammad Akram, for supporting Saba on the matter. Ashraf, a security guard by profession, later surrendered to police along with his son, Safdar, and hence confessed to the murders.
This murder comes just three days after another girl, 17 year old Zeenat Bibi, was tortured and set on fire by her own mother for marrying a man of a different ethnicity. Bibi’s mother later confessed to the crime, while the police also suspected the involvement of her “on-the-run” brother. Following Zeenat’s death on Friday, Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif had issued a statement condemning the news and ordering a detailed investigation into her killing. Sharif even took on to calling these actions “un-Islamic.” A statement from the premier’s office read as follows.
“Prime minister Nawaz Sharif expressed his deep concern and anguish over the killing of the woman in the eastern city of Lahore and said the incident was against the values and traditions of Islam.”
This is the fourth case in a month in which a woman has been burned to death in Pakistan. Just a week before Zeenat’s killing, 19-year-old Maria Sadaqat was reportedlylynched and then burned to death by a mob for refusing a marriage proposal. And about a month earlier, in a village near Abbottabad, a teenage girl was burned alive by the order of village elders for helping a friend elope.
Pakistan regularly sees a lot of cases of deadly violence against women who dare to defy conventional regulations on love and marriage. In Pakistan and some regions of Northern India, honor-killing is the de-facto way to deal with women who violate the conservation and tradition.
In 2015 alone, police in Pakistan formally investigated 76 cases of women being set on fire. Most of these so-called “honor-killings” are carried out by relatives, with a small number carried out by people outside the family. And the worst part is, most of these killings go unreported. Nearly 1,100 women were murdered in so-called honor-killings in Pakistan last year, according to the latest report by the country’s Human Rights Commission.
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