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Four More Arrests in ‘Honor Killing’ of Pakistani Woman One Man, Two Wives and Many Accepted Forms of Violence in Pakistan
(about 11 hours later)
LAHORE, Pakistan — The Pakistani police said Friday that they had arrested four more people in connection with the death of Farzana Parveen, a pregnant woman fatally beaten by her family in a so-called honor killing that has stirred outrage in Pakistan and across the world. LONDON — The murder case of Farzana Parveen, it seemed, could hardly have turned more tragic or gruesome: a 25-year-old pregnant woman, bludgeoned to death with a brick by family members on a busy street, for having married the man she loved.
After an urgent appeal for action from the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, the police on Thursday night arrested Ms. Parveen’s uncle, two cousins and a driver employed by her family. Then, in recent days, came a dark twist.
They are accused of participating in a crowd of about 30 men, said to have been led by her father and two brothers, who surrounded Ms. Parveen, 25, as she was bludgeoned with a brick outside the Lahore High Court building last Tuesday. The police arrested her father, Muhammad Azeem, in the hours after the killing. It turned out that Ms. Parveen’s husband, Muhammad Iqbal — who had been photographed over the bloodied body of his wife, his face etched with grief — had been a black widower five years earlier. Mr. Iqbal, 45, said he had killed his first wife to be with Ms. Parveen, and later won his freedom, legally, using an Islamic provision of Pakistani law. “I strangled her,” he said of his first wife in a telephone interview. “I liked Farzana since she was a child.”
A senior investigator, Umer Riaz Cheema, said the four men arrested Thursday would be presented before one of the city’s antiterrorism courts, which have special powers to expedite criminal prosecutions. The provincial chief minister, Shahaz Sharif, said he had instructed the police to ensure the suspects would face justice as soon as possible. The attack on Ms. Parveen in Lahore, Pakistan, on Tuesday has generated global outrage, a public intervention from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and an unusually aggressive effort by the Pakistani police to pursue those responsible. By Friday morning five men, including Ms. Parveen’s father, had been arrested, but officers were still searching for her two brothers, one of whom faces accusations of beating her to death with a brick.
The manner of Ms. Parveen’s death, before a large group of men on a busy street in a major city, has attracted global attention, highlighting both the brutality of honor killings and the apparent inability of the Pakistani police to protect vulnerable women. To some, Ms. Parveen’s death was a sign of growing religious intolerance in Pakistan, an impression burnished by news media reports of a stoning, an image with echoes of Taliban-era Afghanistan.
According to human rights groups, about 900 women died in similar circumstances in Pakistan in 2013, many beaten, stabbed, burned or shot. Yet rights activists and analysts said the deaths of Mr. Iqbal’s two wives were not a product of religious extremism, but rather stemmed from a deep rooted societal prejudice against women and what they call a flawed legal provision that allows killers to, quite literally, get away with murder.
Photos of Muhammad Iqbal, her grieving husband, hunched over a shawl that covered his wife’s bloodied body have fed the condemnation of honor killings, which often occur in rural areas when a woman elopes with, or marries, a man of her choice in defiance of her parents’ wishes. “The state has created an enabling environment for honor killings,” said Saroop Ijaz, a lawyer and commentator whose office is yards from the spot where Ms. Parveen was felled. “A woman being disciplined by her family is seen as a private matter by the police, the courts and the law.”
But new details that have emerged in Ms. Parveen’s case have suggested that money was also a major factor in her death and that her grieving husband had himself killed a woman in the past. Under an Islamic provision of Pakistan law, a convicted murderer can avoid punishment either by obtaining forgiveness from the victim’s family or through payment of “blood money,” also known as diyat.
Police records show that Mr. Iqbal, 45, killed his first wife, Ayesha Bibi, in October 2009. In a phone interview, Mr. Iqbal confirmed that he had killed Ms. Bibi and said he had done so to be with Ms. Parveen. The rich and powerful often abuse the law to avoid punishment, but rights activists say it can also foster a dangerous sense of impunity.
“I strangled her,” he said, speaking from home in the Faisalabad district, west of Lahore. “I liked Farzana since she was a child.” “It creates the feeling that you can kill a person in broad daylight and get away with it,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, a former Pakistan director for Human Rights Watch.
Police investigators said that Mr. Iqbal absconded after the 2009 murder and stayed with Ms. Parveen’s family, in their home, until he was arrested in April 2013. The police charged him with Ms. Bibi’s murder, but he was released under an Islamic provision of Pakistani law that allows a convict to be freed upon payment of money to the victim’s relatives. In Mr. Iqbal’s case, police records show that after killing his first wife, Ayesha Bibi, in 2009, he absconded for four years, during which he stayed with Ms. Parveen’s family in Nankana Sahib, a district roughly 60 miles west of Lahore.
Mr. Iqbal later asked for Ms. Parveen’s hand in marriage from her father, who agreed in exchange for a dowry of about $800. But then, he said, the family requested more money, and a dispute emerged. The police captured Mr. Iqbal in April 2013 but his incarceration was short-lived. His son, his first wife’s next of kin, legally pardoned him for that killing and he was set free. Months later, he asked for Ms. Parveen’s hand in marriage.
With the matter unresolved, Ms. Parveen and Mr. Iqbal married last January. Ms. Parveen’s family told the police that she had already been married to one of her cousins and claimed that Mr. Iqbal had kidnapped her. But that union was blighted by a dispute with Ms. Parveen’s father over the dowry payment, and came to a bloody conclusion Tuesday outside the Lahore High Court.
The conflict on Tuesday arose when a crowd of men from her family’s village, led by her father and two brothers, surrounded her as she walked from her lawyer’s office to the Lahore High Court. As men crowded around Ms. Parveen, who was three months pregnant, a man fired a gun and the bullet grazed her ankle, said Umer Riaz Cheema, a police investigator. She tried to flee but was pulled to the ground by her shawl.
She was going to the court, her lawyer later said, to give a statement that she had married Mr. Iqbal of her own free will. Her father, Muhammad Azeem, hit her with a brick taken from the side of the road. Then her brother Zahid and a cousin named Mazhar Iqbal took up the attack, the investigator said.
Mr. Cheema, the police investigator, said that one person fired a gun, and the bullet grazed her ankle. Then her father, Mr. Azeem, hit her with a brick taken from the roadside. Her brother Zahid, and a cousin, Mazhar Iqbal, joined in the attack, he said. After Ms. Parveen died, her family continued to beat her body with a shoe. Had she reached the courthouse, her lawyer said, she would have testified that she had married Mr. Iqbal of her own free will.
Mr. Iqbal said he was also beaten by the men. “When Farzana was killed, I fell on her body,” he said. “But they pulled me off and started beating her body and her face with their shoes.” The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported 869 so-called honor killings in 2013. Most occur in rural areas, where tribal practices hold strong.
In the phone interview, from his village in the Faisalabad district, Mr. Iqbal said his wife’s family was still threatening him. “They say they will kill me and remove her body from the grave and burn it,” he said. Ms. Parveen’s death shocked many Pakistanis because it occurred in broad daylight in the country’s second-largest city, outside a courthouse and before a crowd of witnesses.
“We have turned into a nation of brutalized beings unmoved by death,” the Pakistani daily The News said in an editorial.
Even religious conservatives, who rarely stand up for women’s rights, joined in the condemnation.
“These acts have nothing to do with Islam,” said Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, head of the Pakistan Ulema Council, which represents Islamic clerics.
The attack on Ms. Parveen coincided with publicized attacks on women elsewhere: the rape-lynching of two teenage girls in India and the deadly rampage by a disturbed young man in Santa Barbara, Calif. Put together, they highlight “the wave of violence against women,” said Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, on Friday. “Every man, every woman, deserves to be protected by the law.”
The diyat provision has much wider applications than just honor killings, and the law has even been invoked by the United States. In 2011, American officials used it to obtain the release of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. contractor who had shot dead two Pakistanis on the street earlier that year.
The families of his victims were paid $2.34 million in compensation — it was never clear by whom — and Mr. Davis was flown out of Pakistan within hours.
Later, the United States government paid $100,000 to the family of a third man, who was killed by C.I.A. officials who ran him down with their jeep as they rushed to Mr. Davis’s aid, said an American official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The intense focus on Ms. Parveen’s death has created a push for judicial action. Both Mr. Sharif and his brother, the Punjab chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, have publicly urged the police and courts to move swiftly.
Alongside the Islamic provisions, Pakistan’s penal code also has clauses that could be invoked to ensure that Ms. Parveen’s killers serve jail time, said Mr. Ijaz, the lawyer.
Ms. Parveen has now been buried, but her husband, Mr. Iqbal, has complained of fresh threats from her family. “They say they will kill me,” he said, speaking by phone, “and that they will remove her body from the grave and burn it.”