British court sentenced Pakistani parents for honor killing

A British court has jailed a Pakistani-origin couple for lifetime for killing their westernized teenage daughter after the jury found them guilty of the incident.

In an apparent episode of honor killing, the conviction from the parents came after the girl’s sister turned against them, telling a jury how her mother and father suffocated 17-year-old Shafilea with a plastic bag.

The parents, Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed, face life in prison for killing their daughter in 2003. The Chester Crown Court found that the parents killed her daughter in 2003 and dumped her body.

Alesha, the sister of Shafilea told the jury that her parents pushed her sister and then she heard her mother saying to her father just finish it here.

Judge Roderick Evans said, “Your concern about being shamed in your community was greater than the love of your child. Shafilea was a determined, able and ambitious girl who wanted to live a life which was normal in the country and in the town in which you had chosen to live”.

The victim girl was only 10 when she began to rebel against her parents’ strict rules. Her schoolmates described how Shafilea would wear western clothes and change before her parents picked her up.

“Shafilea often went to school crying, describing how her mother would slap her and throw things at her. But it was the last year of her life that was to be the most traumatic”, they added.

Shafilea ran away with her boyfriend Mushtaq Bagas in February 2003 and told council officers she needed emergency accommodation as her parents were trying to force her into an arranged marriage with her cousin.

Her parents took her to Pakistan in the same month where she drank bleach in protest against the arranged marriage. She was eventually released, but rows over her clothing continued.

Eventually, her parents beat her, stuffed a thin white plastic bag into her mouth and held their hands over her mouth and nose until she ”was gone,” her sister testified.

The highest incidence of reported forced marriages is in Muslim communities.

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Posted by Faisal Farooq on Aug 4 2012. Filed under Pakistan, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.