BARCELONA: Police on Wednesday arrested the father of two Pakistani sisters living in Spain who were allegedly killed in the name of honor by their family after luring them back to their homeland last year.
The man, who has not been identified, was arrested in the town of Terrassa, 30 kilometers northwest of Barcelona, where he had lived with his family for years, police sources said.
Investigators are trying to link him to the alleged plot to kill his daughters, Anisa Abbas, 24, and her sister Arooj, 21, who wanted to break their forced marriages, sources said.
The couple was strangled and shot dead in Gujarat, a city in eastern Pakistan, on May 20, 2022, with police saying preliminary investigations suggested it was an “honor killing”.
Six members of the girls’ family were arrested shortly after the bloodshed, including their brother and an uncle, two of the main suspects.
Gujarat police said the two sisters were trying to separate from their husbands – also their cousins – who were still living in Pakistan and were pressuring the women to help them migrate to Spain.
He added that the family had “made up a story to convince them to come to Pakistan for a few days”.
According to JEE News, the family had told them that their mother, who had been there several months earlier, had fallen ill.
The mother, who heard the fatal attack from the adjoining room where she was being held, was rescued by police and returned to Spain where she accused one of her sons of being behind the murder, JEE News said.
A brutal patriarchal practice, so-called “honor killings” put women to death for bringing “shame” to their families.
According to the statistics of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, there were more than 470 cases of honor killings in Pakistan in 2021.
