London: In a widely followed case of honour killing in Britain, a Pakistan-origin couple was jailed for life on Friday after being held guilty of murdering their teenaged daughter who allegedly brought shame to the family due to her westernized lifestyle.
Shafilea Ahmed, 17, was missing from her home in Warrington, Cheshire, in 2003 and was found dead on the banks of the River Kent in Cumbria six months later.
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Her parents, Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, and Farzana Ahmed, 49, had denied her murder but the jury at Chester Crown Court on Friday returned guilty verdicts against them both after a three-month trial.
A taxi driver, Ahmed had earlier claimed that Shafilea ran away from home in the middle of the night and that he never saw her again.
The two had suffocated Shafilea with a plastic bag in an apparent “honour killing” because she had allegedly brought shame on the family. Shafilea’s sister Alesha, had told the jury that her parents had pushed her on to the settee in their house and she heard her mother say “just finish it here”.
The parents had often clashed Shafilea over her westernized lifestyle, and had objected to her wearing the same clothes as her white friends, rather than traditional Pakistani dress.
In 2003, she was allegedly forced to travel to Pakistan, where she was expected to marry a man more than 10 years her senior. In desperation Shafelia swallowed bleach badly burning her throat and causing the man to call off the marriage, declaring she was “damaged goods”. She returned to Britain but went missing from the family home in September 2003.
PTI
