Just Another Honour Killing

It is a case of honour killing. The couple were not beheaded, but were killed with the knives and had severe signs of torture on their heads."
Muhammad Pervaiz, Satrah, Punjab police chief

According to the FIR, the couple's family tied them up in public and beheaded them in a village near Sialkot.—File photo

"Their legs and arms were tied while their mouths were gagged with pieces of cloth. The father of the girl announced loudly that he was going to slit the throat of [his] daughter and her husband."
"He said they should learn what would happen to them [children urged to witness the murders] if they married someone of their own choice."
Muhammad Ijaz, neighbour

It was first reported that Sajjad Ahmed, 31 and his bride Muafia Bibi 17, had been beheaded in a grisly 'honour killing' that took place in Satrah, Punjab province in Pakistan. Neighbours have since denied the beheading; they were, they claim, stabbed to death in the presence of family and neighbours, including children whom the young woman's father who led the killing, insisted it would be instructive to the children to watch.

The young couple had their throats slit and onlookers watched as they then bled to death. This is Pakistan, after all, where honour killings are common enough that human rights groups claim 900 were reported in 2013, though it is generally believed that the number is grossly under-reported.

 A Pakistani woman Nargas Bibi shows family pictures of her son Sajjad Ahmed and his wife Muafia Bibi, who were killed by Bibi’s parents, at her house in Hussain Abad village near Sialkot, Pakistan, Sunday, June 29, 2014. AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary

Residents of this town explained that relatives of the young woman had convinced the couple they supported the marriage, inviting them to the town. Once there, they were drugged.They hadn't long to live, after that. It was a particularly gruesome honour killing. Hundreds of which go virtually unnoticed every year, considered by authorities as representative of domestic accidents or suicides.

They were slaughtered to restore family honour. The young woman evidently married without the consent of her father. For that cardinal cultural social sin she paid dearly. Police are said to have arrested five people who were involved in the atrocity, which is to say 'honour' killing.

In an earlier well publicized case of a couple who had married without her father's consent and who had been bludgeoned to death by her relatives outside a courthouse on a busy Lahore street, Pakistan's prime minister demanded that police chiefs explain why they had done nothing to intervene.