'Honor Killing’ of Pakistani Woman- Four More Arrests made!

It has been revealed that the Pakistani Police has arrested four more people in connection with the death of Farzana Parveen, a pregnant woman fatally beaten by her family in a so-called honor killing that has stirred outrage in Pakistan and across the world.

After an urgent appeal for action from the Prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, the Police on Thursday night arrested Ms. Parveen’s uncle, two cousins and a driver employed by her family.

They are accused of participating in a crowd of about 30 men, having been led by her father and two brothers, who surrounded the 25 year old Ms. Parveen, as she was bludgeoned with a brick outside the Lahore High Court building last Tuesday. 

The manner of Ms. Parveen’s death, before a large group of men on a busy street in a major city, has attracted global attention, highlighting both the brutality of honor killings and the apparent inability of the Pakistani Police to protect vulnerable women.

Photos of Muhammad Iqbal, her grieving husband, hunched over a shawl that covered his wife’s bloodied body have fed the condemnation of honor killings, which often occur in rural areas when a woman elopes with, or marries, a man of her choice in defiance of her parents’ wishes.

But new details that have emerged in Ms. Parveen’s case have suggested that money was also a major factor in her death and that her grieving husband had himself killed a woman in the past.

Police records show that Mr. Iqbal, 45, killed his first wife, Ayesha Bibi, in October 2009. In a phone interview, Mr. Iqbal confirmed that he had killed Ms. Bibi and said he had done so to be with Ms. Parveen.

“I strangled her,” he said, speaking from home in the Faisalabad district, west of Lahore. “I liked Farzana since she was a child.”

Police investigators said that Mr. Iqbal absconded after the 2009 murder and stayed with Ms. Parveen’s family, in their home, until he was arrested in April 2013. The Police charged him with Ms. Bibi’s murder, but he was released under an Islamic provision of Pakistani law that allows a convict to be freed upon payment of money to the victim’s relatives.

Money linked to cause of killing:

Mr. Iqbal later asked for Ms. Parveen’s hand in marriage from her father, who agreed in exchange for a dowry of about $800. But then, he said, the family requested more money, and a dispute emerged.

With the matter unresolved, Ms. Parveen and Mr. Iqbal married in January. Ms. Parveen’s family told the Police that she had already been married to one of her cousins and claimed that Mr. Iqbal had kidnapped her.

The conflict on Tuesday arose when a crowd of men from her family’s village, led by her father and two brothers, surrounded her as she walked from her lawyer’s office to the Lahore High Court.

She was going to the court, her lawyer later said, to give a statement that she had married Mr. Iqbal of her own free will.

Mr. Cheema, the Police investigator, said that one person fired a gun, and the bullet grazed her ankle. Then her father, Mr. Azeem, hit her with a brick taken from the roadside. Her brother Zahid, and a cousin, Mazhar Iqbal, joined in the attack, he said.

Mr. Iqbal said he was also beaten by the men. “When Farzana was killed, I fell on her body, but they pulled me off and started beating her body and her face with their shoes.” he said.

There is absolutely no honor in killing a pregnant and unharmed woman- Roving Informant!