Two sisters living in Spain were tricked into travelling back to Pakistan were they were allegedly strangled and shot dead by their uncle.
Aneesa Abbas, 24, and Arooj Abbas, 21, had allegedly been forced to marry their cousins more than a year ago but had been unable to get visas for their husbands to move to Spain.
The sisters are believed to have been unhappy with their husbands and wanted to marry again in Spain.
But they were reportedly tricked into returning to the north-eastern district of Gujrat in Pakistan, on May 19, and they were killed the next day.
They arrived in Gujrat with the mother Azra Bibi and there they were being pressured by their husbands to apply for spouse visas that would allow them to move to Spain as well.
The sisters put up resistance and were strangled and then shot after they said that they wanted to marry different people in Spain, reported local media.
Police said that the mother of the two women had tried to help them but was then locked in another room, reports Yahoo News.
“The investigations have confirmed that both the sisters were killed in the name of ‘honour’,” said investigating police officer Muhammad Akhtar.
Police said the women’s husbands, Hassan Aurengzeb and Atiq Hanif, their uncle, Hanif Goga, and their brother, Shehryar Abbas, have been arrested and confessed to the killing. Two other men have been arrested in connection with the attack.
It is not uncommon for women in Pakistan to be murdered in so called “honour” killings which are carried out by their family usually. It is often where women are being forced into marriages or refuse to accept what they are told to do by their family.
Last year there were 478 cases of this type of murder in Pakistan according to the country’s Human Rights Commission, but it is feared that there could be as many as 1,000 with others having gone unreported.
Up until six years, some men who carried out the “honour” killings could avoid jail if they received a pardon from their cousins.
Then a law was introduced in 2016 that made it mandatory for anyone found guilty of an “honour” killing to get a life sentence in prison.
