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Pakistan ‘honour killing’ inquiry exonerates police

01 Jun, 2014 - 00:06 0 Views

The Sunday News

Islamabad — The policeman in charge of the investigation into the bludgeoning to death of a pregnant woman on the streets of one of Pakistan’s major cities has questioned whether her death is any more serious than any other murder he deals with, in comments likely to raise further concerns over how the country deals with so-called “honour killings”.

Three days after Farzana Parveen was murdered by a 20-strong mob of her own relatives, the official report has exonerated officers over the failure to stop the killing, which took place close to Lahore’s high court. It claims Parveen had illegally remarried.

“How is this murder any more serious than all the other cases we deal with?” said Zulfiqar Hameed, the senior officer in charge of the investigation. He said he was outraged by international media reports that suggested police stood by and did nothing.

He said international condemnation had been overdone, and that the world failed to understand the cultural context in which the crime had taken place.

“These people come from a village, you can’t expect them to act as if they were on Oxford Street,” he said.

The report, produced after global anger prompted Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to order an urgent inquiry, contradicts numerous claims from witnesses and Parveen’s husband, Muhammad Iqbal, who said police at the scene refused to help him despite his desperate pleas.

It says the attack happened 300 yards from the entrance to the high court, where no police were on duty. Nonetheless, one officer who happened to be passing by managed to grab a pistol that had been used to shoot at Parveen; he was apparently unable to stop her relatives from picking up bricks with which they beat her to death.

Hameed referred to statements by western governments, including foreign secretary William Hague, as “cultural imperialism” and the “white man’s burden”.

There have only been a scattering of small public demonstrations against the case and domestic media largely ignored the story until the prime minister ordered the inquiry.

The hastily prepared report, seen by the Guardian, appears to attempt to give some justification for the murder, claiming Parveen was already legally married to a cousin, called Mazher Iqbal. He was among the attackers who ambushed and killed her as she walked from her lawyer’s office to the entrance of the high court. — The Guardian.

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