Category Archives: Honour Killings

Man kills sister in court, regrets he couldn’t get his hands on her husband

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Yes indeed, A woman actually acting in her own interests instead of the interests of the male members of her family is indeed a capital offense in Islam.

Pakistan Tribune:

Published: August 2, 2012

Raheela, 22 years old, received one fatal point-blank shot in the neck when the judges returned to the court room from a break at around 11:30 am.

HYDERABAD: The courts are one place where the couples, who marry against the will of their families have felt safe in a province which is a hotbed for honour killings, have considered to be their safest refuge. However, the cold-blooded murder of Raheela Sehto on Wednesday, right in front of a bench of Sindh High Court will make to-be couples stop and think for sure.

Raheela, 22 years old, received one fatal point-blank shot in the neck when the judges had returned from a break at around 11:30 am. She was killed by a lawyer, Javed Iqbal Shaikh, whose black coat helped him manage to sneak in the weapon. He is also her brother.

“He [Javed] tried to come near Raheela many times but the police pushed him back,” said Zafar Sehto, Raheela’s brother-in-law. “But he succeeded to get to her when people stood up the judges entered the courtroom after the break.”

Zafar said that these few seconds distracted the police and Javed executed Raheela. He also tried to kill her husband, Zulfiqar Sehto, but the police grabbed him before he could take an aim.

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Jordanian kills divorced sister over ‘suspicions’

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Al Arabia:

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Murder is punishable by death in Jordan, but in so-called “honor killings,” courts can commute or reduce sentences, particularly if the victim's family asks for leniency. (AP)

Murder is punishable by death in Jordan, but in so-called “honor killings,” courts can commute or reduce sentences, particularly if the victim’s family asks for leniency. (AP)
By AFP

AMMAN

A Jordanian man was charged on Wednesday with killing his divorced sister after stabbing her and driving his truck over her body several times because of her alleged “suspicious behavior,” police said.

“The suspect, in his forties, was charged with premeditated murder after confessing to the crime, claiming his divorced sister had indulged in suspicious behavior,” a police spokesman told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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Afghan father shot dead his two daughters in ‘honour killing’ after they ran away with Nato interpreter

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Daily Mail:

  • Killings come as Afghan couple who eloped to Pakistan enter police custody amid fears they will be murdered

PUBLISHED: 19:26 GMT, 22 July 2012 | UPDATED: 16:41 GMT, 23 July 2012

An Afghan man shot his two teenage daughters dead when they returned home four days after running away with a young man, police said today.

The father has been detained on murder charges in Nad Ali district in the southern province of Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban insurgency, provincial police spokesman Farid Ahmad Farhang said.

‘He killed two of his daughters. His daughters had run away with a young man four days ago. When they returned home their father killed them,’ Mr Farhang said.

This week's killings come after a video emerged earlier this month (still shown above) in which the Taliban are seen executing a woman accused of adulteryThis week’s killings come after a video emerged earlier this month (still shown above) in which the Taliban are seen executing a woman accused of adultery

Police have issued an arrest warrant for the young man, who is said to be working as an interpreter with Nato forces in the southern province, the spokesman added.

Relations between men and women outside marriage are strictly controlled under Islam and infringements are harshly punished by most families in ultra-conservative Afghanistan.

Despite progress since the fall of the Taliban, so-called ‘honour killing’ remains a common practice in the war-torn Islamic nation.

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Shafilea Ahmed’s mother ‘saw husband attack daughter’

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Beirut used to be called,  “The Paris of the East”. Well that is sort of true again actually as its hard to tell the two cities apart in some areas. But London seems well on it’s way to being “The Lahore of the West”

BBC:

Shafilea Ahmed Shafilea Ahmed’s parents both deny murdering their teenage daughter

The mother of Shafilea Ahmed saw her husband attack her daughter on the night she disappeared, a court has heard.

Farzana Ahmed had previously denied seeing any attack on 11 September 2003 but has now changed her defence, the prosecution told Chester Crown Court.

Mrs Ahmed, 49, and her husband Iftikhar, 52, both deny murdering their daughter at their Warrington home.

The 17-year-old’s remains were found near the River Kent, Cumbria, in 2004.

Henry Riding, prosecuting, told the jury the new defence case statement contained an admission from Mrs Ahmed that an “incident of violence” towards Shafilea did occur.

‘Punched by husband’

It said Mrs Ahmed came downstairs to find her husband attacking Shafilea.

She claims she tried to intervene but was “punched with a clenched fist” and went upstairs with the other children as she was “scared”.

She said she went back downstairs 20 minutes later and asked where Shafilea was.

She alleges Mr Ahmed replied: “If you care for your dear life and that of your children don’t ever ask me this question again.”

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SUN TV theorizes about Montreal Murder…

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I have a theory of my own. First, the SUN clip which speculates wildly about the reasons for neighbors not calling authorities.

So I decided to look up the killing and see if anywhere in the media it bothers to mention the killer’s name in case there might be a clue as to motive…

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Honour killing’ of mother, 30, beheaded by her ex-husband… who then decapitated their two young children because they’d watched

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Daily Mail:

  • Boy, eight, and girl, nine killed in horrific execution
  • Father decided to spare their two-year-old daughter

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 17:52 GMT, 4 July 2012 | UPDATED: 18:42 GMT, 4 July 2012

A 30-year-old woman and two of her children were beheaded overnight in Afghanistan’s east, police said, in what appeared to be the latest in a rapidly growing trend of so-called honour killings.

Police said they suspected the woman Serata’s divorced husband of barging into her house in the capital of Ghazni province and murdering her, alongside their eight-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter.

‘The children saw the killer take their mother’s head off, so he killed them too,’ a local policeman said, adding that the attacker had spared Sereta’s two-year-old daughter.

Activists say there has been a sharp rise in violent attacks on women in Afghanistan over the past year.

Beheaded: The situation for women in Afghanistan has worsened this year, according to activistsBeheaded: The situation for women in Afghanistan has worsened this year, according to activists

They blame President Hamid Karzai’s waning attention to women’s rights as his government prepares for the exit of most foreign troops in 2014 and seeks to negotiate with the Taliban, Afghanistan’s former Islamist rulers.

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A couple of articles on honour killings in Western nations as well as a solution!

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First, an article from the Middle East Forum:

Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings

by Phyllis Chesler
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2010, pp. 3-11

To combat the epidemic of honor killings requires understanding what makes these murders unique. They differ from plain and psychopathic homicides, serial killings, crimes of passion, revenge killings, and domestic violence. Their motivation is different and based on codes of morality and behavior that typify some cultures, often reinforced by fundamentalist religious dictates. In 2000, the United Nations estimated that there are 5,000 honor killings every year

[1] That number might be reasonable for Pakistan alone, but worldwide the numbers are much greater. In 2002 and again in 2004, the U.N. brought a resolution to end honor killings and other honor-related crimes. In 2004, at a meeting in The Hague about the rising tide of honor killings in Europe, law enforcement officers from the U.K. announced plans to begin reopening old cases to see if certain murders were, indeed, honor murders.

[2] The number of honor killings is routinely underestimated, and most estimates are little more than guesses that vary widely. Definitive or reliable worldwide estimates of honor killing incidence do not exist.

 

Morsal O, a 16-year-old German-Afghan girl, was killed in May 2008 by her 24-year-old brother Ahmad Sobair O. He stabbed her twenty-three times in a parking lot in Hamburg, Germany, because of her alleged impure moral conduct. Murder of teenage or young adult women by their fathers or other close male relatives is characteristic of classic honor killings and is not a pattern in non-immigrant Western populations.

Most honor killings are not classified as such, are rarely prosecuted, or when prosecuted in the Muslim world, result in relatively light sentences.[3] When an honor killing occurs in the West, many people, including the police, still shy away from calling it an honor killing. In the West, both Islamist and feminist groups, including domestic violence activists, continue to insist that honor killings are a form of Western-style domestic violence or femicide (killing of women).[4]They are not.[5] This study documents that there are at least two types of honor killings and two victim populations. Both types differ significantly from each other, just as they differ from Western domestic femicide. One group has an average age of seventeen; the other group’s average age is thirty-six. The age difference is a statistically significant one.

 

Families Killing Their Young Women

The study’s findings indicate that honor killings accelerated significantly in a 20-year period between 1989 and 2009.[6]This may mean that honor killings are genuinely escalating, perhaps as a function of jihadist extremism and Islamic fundamentalism, or that honor killings are being more accurately reported and prosecuted, especially in the West, but also in the East. The expansion of the Internet may account for wider reporting of these incidents.

The worldwide average age of victims for the entire population is twenty-three (Table 1). This is true for all geographical regions. Thus, wherever an honor killing is committed, it is primarily a crime against young people. Just over half of these victims were daughters and sisters; about a quarter were wives and girlfriends of the perpetrators. The remainder included mothers, aunts, nieces, cousins, uncles, or non-relatives.

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Now, the solution!

A lecturer at Karolinska institutet has been arrested for an elaborate abuse of his wife.

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Anyone want to bet that this ‘lecturer’s’ specialty is Islamic studies?

from Aftonbladet:

Translation: Michael Laudahn

 

A lecturer at Karolinska institutet has been arrested for an elaborate abuse of his wife. 

He suspected her of having been untrue, and attacked her in a rage, using a knife. 

“He cut off her lips, then ate them”, says a person close to the file. 

The event took place at the couple’s home in south Stockholm. The degree of violence was such that the public prosecutor wanted the man arrested for attempted murder. 

During the preliminary hearing held recently behind closed doors, tingsrätten [lower-instance court] stated that the suspicions [against him] would qualify for particularly grave abuse, something that will possibly change again during the course of the investigation.

‘Honour-related’

The lecturer who is a prominent researcher in his domain recognises the factual circumstances. 

‘It is honour-related, he doesn’t seem to regret anything, he thinks that it was her who mortified him’, says a person close to the file. 

Advokat Ingela Hessius Ekman represents the wife, who now is staying at a secret location. 

‘Of course, she isn’t fine, neither psychically nor physically.’

‘She has very severe damages, the doctors cannot yet state to what degree she can be restored, or if at all. It will take time before this can be judged, if it is possible to do something and what in this case can be done.’

Has several children

The lecturer has been married before and has several children from this marriage. Some weeks after he divorced his earlier wife, he married again, a considerably younger woman. 

According to Aftonbladet’s [this paper] information, he recently got the impression that she was deceiving him. Therefore he decided to punish her and cause her damage for the rest of her life. 

‘It was meant [by him] not be possible to re-attach her lips.’

The lecturer will now have to undergo a little mental examination, in order to find out if some serious psychological derangement can be suspected. 


 

Shafilea Ahmed’s sister said she saw her parents kill her, court told

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Guardian UK:

H/T UK Pete

Alesha Ahmed told police she watched Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed suffocate their daughter to death, jury hears

Shafilea Ahmed

Shafilea Ahmed’s body was found near a flooded Cumbrian river in 2004. Photograph: PA

A teenager told police she watched her parents suffocate her sister to death by forcing a carrier bag into her mouth so she could not breathe and placing their hands over her face, a court heard on Tuesday.

Alesha Ahmed, now 23, said she watched her parents “acting together” during the murder of her older sister, Shafilea Ahmed, 17, on 11 September 2003, Chester crown court heard. She said that later that night she saw her father with a large object wrapped in binbags and brown tape – which she assumed was Shafilea – and which he drove off with in a car.

Alesha’s parents, Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, a taxi driver, and his wife, Farzana, 49, deny murdering Shafilea, whose badly decomposed remains were found near a flooded Cumbrian river five months later in February 2004. The couple sat impassively in the wood panelled courtroom, with Farzana occasionally dabbing her nose.

The prosecution barrister, Andrew Edis QC, said Alesha watched as her parents suffocated her sister at their home in Warrington, Cheshire on the night she went missing. He said: “Both parents acting together got a carrier bag that they forced into her mouth. Their hands were over her face, closing her airways so she couldn’t breathe.”

In the immediate aftermath of Shafilea’s murder, Alesha “talks about looking into the kitchen and seeing her mother sorting through a pile of blankets and sheets. She saw her mother with black binbags and two rolls of wide brown tape and some black tape,” Edis said.

Then she looked out of the kitchen window and saw her father with a large object wrapped in binbags and brown tape, “which she assumed was the body of her sister”, said Edis. Soon after, at around 10pm, she is said to have heard a car driving off with her father at the wheel and her mother remaining in the house.

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More here:  And also here

Parents ‘murdered their Westernised teenage daughter in front of her sister because they thought she was bringing shame on the family’

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Daily Mail:

  • Shafilea Ahmed’s decomposed remains were found in February 2004
  • Her parents Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed are accused of killing her in September 2003
  • Their daughter Alesha is said to have witnessed the killing and will give evidence against her parents
  • Police placed listening device in the family’s home in November 2003 and heard them telling their children ‘not to say anything’ at school
  • Victim ‘drank bleach after being forced to visit Pakistan for to meet future husband in arranged marriage’

By James White

PUBLISHED: 07:59 EST, 21 May 2012 | UPDATED: 12:13 EST, 21 May 2012

'Murdered': The parents of Shafilea Ahmed, pictured, are on trial for her killing ‘Murdered’: The parents of Shafilea Ahmed, pictured, are on trial for her killing

A teenage girl was murdered by her parents because she had become ‘Westernised’ and no longer obeyed their strict rules, a jury heard today.

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed are accused of attacking her in a killing allegedly witnessed by their other daughter, before dumping her body by a river.

The decomposed remains 17-year-old Shafilea were discovered in Cumbria in February 2004.

Today, as her parents Iftikhar and Farzana Ahmed went on trial for murder, prosecutor Andrew Edis QC told Chester Crown Court they had killed her because she refused to obey them.

Opening the case against the Ahmeds, Mr Edis told the jury of seven men and five women: ‘The defendants, having spent the best part of 12 months trying to really crush her, realised they were never going to be able to succeed and finally killed her because her conduct dishonoured the family, bringing shame on them.’

Ahmed, 52, and his 49-year-old wife, deny murdering Shafilea at their home in Warrington in September 2003.

Mr Edis said: ‘The prosecution alleges that she (Shafilea) was murdered by the two defendants, her parents, at the family home on the night of September 11/12, September 2003. She was 17-years-old.’

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Chechen women in mortal fear as president backs Islamic honor killings

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Washington Times:

ACHXOY-MARTAN, Chechnya — Chechnya’s government is openly approving of families that kill female relatives who violate their sense of honor, as this Russian republic embraces a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam after decades of religious suppression under Soviet rule.

In the past five years, the bodies of dozens of young Chechen women have been found dumped in woods, abandoned in alleys and left along roads in the capital, Grozny, and neighboring villages.

 

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov publicly announced that the dead women had “loose morals” and were rightfully shot by male relatives. He went on to describe women as the property of their husbands, and said their main role is to bear children.

“If a woman runs around and if a man runs around with her, both of them should be killed,” said Mr. Kadyrov, who often has stated his goal of making Chechnya “more Islamic than the Islamists.”

In today’s Chechnya, alcohol is all but banned, Islamic dress codes are enforced and polygamous marriages are supported by the government.

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Second suspect arrested in teen stabbing case

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The Local:

Another person has been arrested in the investigation of the Landskrona killing on Monday in southern Sweden, where a 19-year-old woman was stabbed to death.

“This is a woman born in 1973. She was apprehended at 6pm on Wednesday and was formally arrested at 8.45pm,” said police spokesperson Eva-Lotta Hermansson Truedsson to news agency TT.

According to prosecutor Magnus Larsson, the arrested woman could be described as close to the victim.

He said that the woman is under suspicion of instigating the murder and that it is possible that the circle of suspects could widen.

Currently, it doesn’t seem as if either of the two apprehended suspects will be released.

“Not the way it looks right now, but there are a number of measures being carried out and the situation could easily change,” said the prosecutor to TT.

Police arrested the woman’s 16-year-old brother after finding him outside the apartment, the Aftonbladet newspaper reported on Wednesday.

It has been alleged that the boy killed his sister for disgracing their family by having several boyfriends and trying to build a life for herself away from home, but this has not been confirmed by police.

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Pregnant woman ‘was smothered to death by family before they claimed she was killed by an evil spirit’

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Daily Mail:

  • Nalia Mumtaz, 21, was found lying lifeless on a bed at the family home
  • Her unborn child also died with her
  • Her husband, his parents and his brother-in-law all deny charges of murder and manslaughter

By David Wilkes

PUBLISHED: 16:41 EST, 24 April 2012 | UPDATED: 16:54 EST, 24 April 2012

A pregnant wife was smothered to death by her husband, his parents and his brother-in-law who later all claimed she may have been killed by an evil spirit, a court has heard.

Nalia Mumtaz, 21, was pronounced dead at hospital after being rushed there by paramedics who found her lying lifeless and ashen faced on a bed at the family home. Her unborn child died with her.

Her husband Mohammed Mumtaz, 24, his father Zia Ul Haq and mother Salma Aslam, both 51, as well as his brother in law Hammad Hassan, 24, all deny charges of murder and manslaughter.

Pictured left-right are Mohammed Mumtaz, Salma Aslam, Zia Ul-Haq and Hammad Hassan Death: A pregnant wife was smothered to death by family members who later all claimed she may have been killed by an evil spirit, a court has heard. Pictured left-right are Mohammed Mumtaz, Salma Aslam, Zia Ul-Haq and Hammad Hassan who appeared at court today

Tragic: The family home in Birmingham, pictured, where Nalia Mumtaz was foundTragic: The family home in Birmingham, pictured, where Nalia Mumtaz was found

At Birmingham Crown Court today, prosecutor Christopher Hotten said the cultural context in which Mrs Mumtaz met her death on July 8, 2009 was of importance, as were the religious beliefs of the defendants, described as a ‘traditional Muslim family with an emphasis on religious observance’.

He asked the jury: ‘Was she or may she have been possessed by an evil spirit which took her life as the defendants were to suggest both at the time and after her death?

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