In Pakistan, gruesome 'honour' killings bring a new backlash
LAHORE: Parveen Rafiq screamed from her rooftop, "I have killed my daughter. I have saved my honour. She will never shame me again."
In the room below lay the charred body of 18-year-old Zeenat. Neighbours in the narrow alley who saw the smoke and heard screams rushed to Rafiq's home, but the door was bolted from within.
Zeenat was dead. Her mother had choked her, and while the girl was still alive she doused her with kerosene and set her on fire. Zeenat's crime was to marry a childhood friend she loved, defying her widowed mother's pressure for an arranged marriage and, in the mind of her mother and many of her neighbours, tarnishing her family's honour.
Her death on June 8 was the latest in a series of increasingly gruesome “honour” killings in Pakistan, which has one of the highest rates of such killings in the world.
In one case, a mother slit the throat of her pregnant daughter who had married a man she loved. In Abbottabad, a teenage girl who helped a friend elope was tortured, injected with poison and then strapped to the seat of a vehicle and set on fire. A jirga, or council of local elders, ordered her killing as a message to others.