Two Pakistani sisters who resided in Catalonia were killed by their relatives in eastern Pakistan in an apparent ‘honour’ crime, after the young women requested a divorce from their cousins, with whom they had married, and refused to allow them to accompany them back to Europe.
The 20- and 24-year-old sisters were originally from Gujrat, in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab, where on Friday night “they were strangled and fatally shot in their sleep”A local police spokesman, Nauman Hassan, told EFE on Monday that he noted that six suspects have been arrested.
“Today the police got five days of preventive detention for six of the alleged murderers. The defendants were arrested yesterday, during the 24 hours after the event. According to the initial investigation, the sisters were honor killed,” Hassan said.
The spokesman has assured that the young women, after falling into a “trap”, had returned to Pakistan on Thursday, and their relatives tried to get the sisters to intercede for their cousins before the Spanish authorities, with whom they had married them “more than a year ago”. year”, so that they could “emigrate to Spain”.
“The sisters (…) wanted to get a divorce after the arranged marriage and both wanted to marry others,” concluded Hassan, who added that there are still three suspects without arrest, and the father of the girls “is still in Spain.” The mother has refused to file a complaint, something common in honor crimes.
Although at first it was believed that the two young women had Spanish nationality, sources from the Spanish embassy in Islamabad told Efe that the sisters are Pakistanis with a residence permit in Spain, where they were domiciled in Catalonia.
The Terrassa City Council has informed EFE that they have not yet received official confirmation that they are residents of the city and that when it arrives they will activate the “mourning protocol” established in these cases.
According to Mossos sources, at least one of the two murdered young women lived in Terrassa, while the other remains to be determined.
As they are not Spanish citizens, the embassy’s consular assistance service cannot be activated, they have warned. In addition, these are Pakistanis who are in their own country, so it is the Pakistani authorities that are dealing with the event.
These types of cases, however, are not isolated, and as diplomatic sources explained, in recent years the Spanish embassy has responded to several requests for help from Spanish citizens of Pakistani origin whom they had kidnapped.
Sometimes they even carried out rescue operations, in which the woman was first informed that a car would be waiting for her at a certain time of night to take her directly to the embassy, where she would then receive consular protection.
Those known as honor killings are common in South Asia and often involve male members of a family who commit what they consider to be an affront that contravenes the conservative family morals of local societies.
According to data from the NGO Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Last year alone, 478 honor crimes were recorded in the country. Between 2004 and May 2018, that figure rose to 17,628 cases, although it is believed that the real number could be much higher due to the lack of complaints, especially when it comes to relatives.
The Pakistani government approved in 2016 a law that prohibits the pardon of the relatives of the victims in this type of crime, a legal hole with which many men were free after killing a woman, generally a sister or a wife.
However, human rights groups and activists warn that the law has had little impact in curbing these crimes.