LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — Parveen Rafiq closed her hands around the neck of her youngest daughter, Zeenat, and squeezed and squeezed until the girl was almost dead.
Then, in the tiny apartment where the family lived, she doused the 18-year-old with kerosene and set her on fire.
Neighbors saw the smoke and rushed to the home. Someone inside, apparently one of Rafiq’s daughters-in-law, was screaming, “Help her! Help!”
But the door was bolted from within. Moments later, they heard Rafiq scream from her rooftop: “I have killed my daughter. I have saved my honor. She will never shame me again.”
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Zeenat’s crime was marrying 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 neighbors, tarnishing her family’s honor.
Her macabre death on June 8 in the eastern city of Lahore was the latest in a series of increasingly gruesome “honor killings” in Pakistan, a country with 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 yet another a jilted suitor doused a teenage girl with kerosene and set her on fire.
Finish reading: In Pakistan, gruesome ‘honor’ killings bring a new backlash
HWH: This barbarism must end. Charge these parents. Put them on trial. How can honor killings be legal? Pakistan = Shame.
HAPPY WHITE HORSE™ 