A court in Pakistan authorized the Police this Saturday to keep the six relatives arrested for the murder of the two Pakistani sisters residing in Spain in custody for five days for questioning.
“The court today granted five more days to interrogate them,” one of those responsible for the investigation, Akhtar Hussain, told Efe.
On May 20 in the town of Nothia, in the eastern province of Punjab, Aneesa Abbas, 20, and her sister Arooj Abbas, 24, were killed by their relatives for requesting a divorce from their husbands and refusing to take them. back to the Spanish city of Terrassa (Barcelona), where they lived.
The murder occurred in the house of Aneesa’s in-laws, where her cousin Atiq ur Rehman lived, with whom she was married against her will in 2020. In the next house, separated only by a wall, the in-laws of Aneesa lived. Arooj, who had been married in 2019 to Hassan, a son of a paternal aunt. The two young women had arrived from Spain a day earlier.
On Sunday the 22nd, the Police arrested six suspects, the sisters’ husbands, Aneesa’s father-in-law and also Muhammed Hanif’s uncle, his son, Qasid, and two brothers of the young women, Asfandyar and Shehryar.
After five days of interrogation, investigators today asked a Kharian city court for more time to finalize the investigation, as the gun with which the girls were shot has still not been found.
“We hope to recover the pistol in one or two days and complete the investigation in the five days granted,” said the police officer.
The defendants must appear again on June 2 before the court, which must decide whether they are transferred to a prison from where they must wait for the trial to begin.
Hussain claimed that Azra Bibi, the mother of the two murdered sisters, visited the Guliana Police Station and met with two of her sons accused of the crime.
“Both sons hugged their mother, cried and asked for her forgiveness,” said the officer, who was present during the meeting.
Their eldest son, Shehryar, said killing them was “a mistake,” according to Hussain, who added that both he and his brother Asfandyar Abbas have expressed remorse for the girls’ murder.
The mother and the youngest of her children, nine years old, plan to travel in the coming days from Islamabad to Spain, according to the Pakistani consul general in Barcelona, ??Mirza Salam, yesterday.
Those known as honor killings are common in South Asia and often involve male members of a family committing 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), 478 honor crimes were recorded in the country last year alone. Between 2004 and 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.
