Father, grandfather awarded life in jail for ‘honour’ killing of girl

Around two years and three months after a teenage girl and her fiancé were murdered over taking selfies together, a sessions court in Karachi convicted the girl’s father and grandfather finding them guilty of the so-called honour killing.

Nineteen-year-old Marina was poisoned to death on November 7, 2018, a day after her 30-year-old maternal cousin Salman, who was also her fiancé, was shot dead in Swat in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, according to the deputy district public prosecutor, Shakil Abbasi.

The Model Criminal Court - West judge awarded life imprisonment to Abdul Rahim and his father Abdul Hakim, observing that the prosecution had successfully established the offence on them.

The case was brought to the limelight by the girl’s mother, Abida, who had moved the court seeking directions for police to register an FIR on her complaint against her husband and father-in-law for poisoning her daughter at their residence in Pirabad.

The accused on the other hand claimed that the girl had committed suicide by consuming a poisonous substance after learning about the killing of her fiancé in Swat, the investigation officer (IO) of the case, Farooq Janjua, said.

On the court orders, the body was exhumed and a post-mortem examination was conducted by a medical board in the presence of a judicial magistrate to ascertain the facts as narrated by the complainant. She had told police that her sister and her son Salman had visited her house in the city from Swat where the couple met and took selfies together to which her in-laws objected to.

She had added that the couple was due to be married a month later and alleged that her husband and father-in-law first got Salman killed in Swat through their relatives and after that poisoned her daughter to paint the incident as a suicide.

The police had registered the girl’s murder case here while the murder case of her fiancé was registered in Swat. Three paternal uncles of the girl, who have been accused of abetting the murders, are absconding and the case against them has been put on dormancy until their arrest, added the IO.