The father of two young women living in Spain who were murdered in Pakistan in May 2022 in a probable “honour killing” after they resisted their forced marriage was arrested near Barcelona on Wednesday, a police source said.
The arrest took place in Terrassa, a town in the Catalonia region of northeastern Spain where the family lives, the source told AFP news agency. Six other family members of Aneesa and Arooj Abbas – including a brother and an uncle suspected of committing the double murder – had already been arrested in Pakistan shortly after the crime.
Pakistani police believe that the two young women were killed out of a sense of ”honour”, a patriarchal practice in Pakistan in which women are killed to clear the family honour, a notion that is deeply rooted in this very conservative country.
Aneesa and Arooj, aged 24 and 21 respectively, wanted to separate from their Pakistani husbands, who were also their cousins. According to the Pakistani police, the two sisters were “pressured” by their spouses to help them migrate to Spain. Le Figaro