The father of two young women living in Spain, who were murdered in an alleged “honor killing” in Pakistan in May 2022 after opposing their forced marriage, was arrested near Barcelona on Wednesday, a police source tells us .
This arrest took place in Terrassa, a town in the region of Catalonia (northeast Spain) where the family lives, this source told AFP.
Six other family members of Aneesa and Arooj Abbas, including one of their brothers and an uncle, suspected of having committed the double assassination, were arrested shortly after the events in Pakistan.
Pakistani police believe the two young women were killed out of “honor,” a patriarchal practice of killing women to wash away family honor, a notion ingrained in this very conservative country.
Aneesa and Arooj, aged 24 and 21 respectively, were seeking separation from their Pakistani husbands, who were also their cousins. They were lured to Gujrat, a city in eastern Pakistan, in May 2022, where they were strangled and shot, said Gujrat police spokesman at the time, Nauman Hassan.
“The family made up a story to convince them to come to Pakistan for a few days,” he told AFP.
According to the Spanish daily El País, their family had informed them that their mother, who was in Gujrat, was ill. The latter, who allegedly overheard members of her family attacking her daughters, named one of her sons as the main culprit, the newspaper said.
According to Pakistani police, the two sisters were under “pressure” from their spouses to help them emigrate to Spain.
In Pakistan, police recorded more than 470 so-called “honor” killings in 2021, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). However, many cases go unreported because families tend to shield those responsible.