Pakistani police are investigating the killing of two Pakistani-Spanish sisters who were killed for “honor”, according to a patriarchal practice that involves killing women to save the good name of the family. The agents are trying to shed light on the deaths of Aneesa Abbas, 24, and Arooj Abbas, 21.
The two women wanted to separate from their Pakistani husbands and for this reason, they were in Spain. But they were lured to Gujrat and once they arrived in their country of origin, they were strangled and shot dead. To attract the two girls would have been the family who would have invented a story to convince them to return for a few days. From the first investigations, the police report, it is clear that this is an honor killing.
The two sisters were killed in the same district of Punjab in which in 2019 the 26-year-old Italian-Pakistani Sana Cheema found death, returned home from Brescia to visit her family and killed because she wanted to marry a non-Muslim Italian citizen. To sidetrack the investigation, the family members had initially said that the girl had died of natural causes but the autopsy revealed that she had been strangled. Later her relatives had confessed to the crime, only to later retract. Sana’s father, brother, uncle and seven other people ended up on trial and were all acquitted by a Gujrat court for lack of evidence. In 2021, more than 400 ‘honor killings’ were reported in Pakistan.