Unrepentant father recounts ‘honor killings’
MULTAN, Pakistan – Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25-year old stepsister to salvage his family’s “honor” – a crime that shocked Pakistan.
The 40-year-old laborer, speaking in police detention as he was being shifted to prison, confessed to just one regret – that he didn’t murder the stepsister’s alleged lover too.
Hundreds of girls and women are murdered by male relatives each year in this conservative Islamic nation, and rights groups said Wednesday such “honor killings” will only stop when authorities get serious about punishing perpetrators.
The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that in more than half of such cases that make it to court, most end with cash settlements paid by relatives to the victims’ families, although under a law passed last year, the minimum penalty is 10 years, the maximum death by hanging.
Ahmed’s killing spree – witnessed by his wife Rehmat Bibi as she cradled their 3-month-old baby son – happened Friday night at their home in the cotton-growing village of Gago Mandi in eastern Punjab province.
Bibi recounted how she was woken by a shriek as Ahmed put his hand to the mouth of his stepdaughter Muqadas and cut her throat with a machete. Bibi looked helplessly on from the corner of the room as he then killed the three girls – Bano, 8, Sumaira, 7, and Humaira, 4 – pausing between the slayings to brandish the bloodstained knife at his wife, warning her not to intervene or raise alarm.
“I was shivering with fear. I did not know how to save my daughters,” Bibi, sobbing, told the Associated Press by phone from the village.
The next morning, Ahmed was arrested. Appearing disheveled but composed, he said he killed Muqadas because she had committed adultery, and his daughters because he didn’t want them to do the same when they grew up.
“I thought the younger girls would do what their eldest sister had done, so they should be eliminated,” he said.
Despite Ahmed’s contention that Muqadas had committed adultery – a claim made by her husband – the rights commission reported that according to local people, Muqadas had fled her husband because he had abused her and forced her to work in a brick-making factory.
Police in Multan said they would complete their investigation into Ahmed’s case in the next two weeks and that he faces the death sentence if he is convicted for the killings and terrorizing his neighborhood.