Police in the Pakistan city of Lahore are hunting for two men over the murder of a UK resident they had each reportedly been pressurising to marry them.
The suspects are being hunted as a close friend of Mayra Zulfiquar has told Sky News how the victim’s parents are struggling to come to terms with their daughter’s death.
Ms Zulfiquar, a 24-year-old law graduate of Pakistani origin who is a Belgian national, was found dead with bullet wounds in her rented flat after four men, including the two chief suspects, were believed to have broken in early on Monday.
Sky correspondent Mark White has said Ms Zulfiquar was buried in a funeral service in Lahore this morning in accordance with Islamic tradition.
Her parents flew out to the city from Feltham, in west London, to attend the service.
Their daughter had travelled to Pakistan for a wedding two months ago and had decided to stay, the English-language newspaper Dawn has reported.
Police have detained two men for questioning over the death as they hunt for another two suspects.
Punjab police superintendent Sidra Khan, citing an initial post-mortem report, told Dawn that Ms Zulfiquar had two bullet wounds – one to her neck and another to her arm – and had bled to death.
Bruises were found on her right hand and left foot.
Police said they have opened a first information report (FIR) on the case after receiving a complaint from Ms Zulfiquar’s uncle, Lahore resident Mohammad Nazeer.
The FIR said Mr Nazeer found his niece’s body after receiving a phone call from her father in London to say she had been killed.
Published: October 13th, 2020 Updated: July 21st, 2022
“You don’t get to say goodbye to anyone, you don’t get to phone them up and say ‘oh by the way I’m going into witness protection, I’m not going to speak to you’.”
Self-isolation and reduced contact with friends and family has been a necessity during the pandemic, but for some people it’s a never-ending reality.
The BBC was given extremely rare access to someone in the closely-guarded and secretive UK Protected Persons Service (UKPPS).
For more than 20 years, Sian (not her real name) says she was a victim of horrendous, sustained, physical and sexual domestic violence.
As a result, she and her children now live in “witness protection” conditions in a state of enforced separation and anonymity.
Having grown up with abuse throughout her childhood, Sian was a teenager when she met the man she would later marry.
But things quickly took a dark turn.
At first it was sexual violence,” she said, pausing briefly after every few words.
“But then physical violence crept in. Within three weeks he was raping me. That led to two decades of domestic violence.”
Things got worse after Sian had children.
But – after a particularly traumatic experience – she sought medical help and that led to wider involvement from the authorities – the police deemed the risk to her life was so severe, she had to enter the protected persons service right away.
Life changed immediately.
She and her children were moved to another part of the UK and, to all intents and purposes, dropped off the face of the earth to many people they knew. They were given new identities and asked to start over.
“There’s always this constant reminder of what has happened and where we are, so that will never leave us,” she told me, hesitating.
“Your old life stopped and your new life has started. You live ‘normal’, which is normal for us, but not for anybody else.”
It’s not just witnesses of serious crime that are part of the UKPPS.
It is also for people like Sian, where the threat on their life is so severe, there is no other option.
Published: August 26th, 2020 Updated: July 21st, 2022
A charity says critical failures have severely damaged the effectiveness of police investigations of sexual abuse affecting BAME complainants
A Teesside charity has filed a “super complaint” against alleged systemic mishandling of sexual abuse cases by police forces – including Cleveland Police.
Tees Valley Inclusion Project and its charity the Halo Project, based on Teesside, supports women and girls facing illegal cultural harms
This includes honour-based violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation.
The charity says police forces are perpetuating an environment which makes it harder for people in the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) community to report sexual abuse.
The super complaint details nine ‘key failures’ in police responses to reports of sexual abuse within the BAME community.
It claims these severely damage the effectiveness of police investigations and harms confidence in the police’s commitment to properly investigate serious allegations.
Halo Project is one of 16 super complaints bodies in the country and one of two designated BAME super complaints bodies.
The super complaint is called “Invisible Survivors – The Long Wait For Justice,”and the charity has been collecting evidence and data for several years.
Yasmin Khan, chief executive of Halo Project said: “Our main mission at Halo is to protect and support those facing honour-based violence issues such as sexual and domestic abuse, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation (FGM).
“This systemic issue in our policing system significantly affects the interests of the public and it must be addressed.”
Filing the report to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, the College of Policing and the Independent Office for Police Conduct, Halo Project says it wants to work with the police forces to create a safer environment for both BAME communities and the wider public.
Ms Khan added: “Our aim is to work with the police and other bodies to develop a national action plan, based upon the key recommendations within our super complaint.
“We hope to be working closely and positively with the police and the wider criminal justice system to ensure these recommendations are implemented.”
Halo Project recommends that the police “establish an independent national BAME reference group to include survivors who can identify the key areas of improvement for investigations in the future”.
It adds: “The project is committed to ensuring the voices within the super-complaint are not forgotten and we learn from their experiences.”
There are approximately 12 reported honour killings per year in the UK with national statistics showing that South Asian females under the age of 24 are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than their Caucasian counterparts.
Halo Project aims to raise awareness in order for to victims feel able to seek help at an earlier stage and the relevant agencies intervene more quickly to prevent abuse from taking place.
Teesside Live has contacted Cleveland Police and the College of Policing for comment.
Published: August 10th, 2016 Updated: August 10th, 2016
Four years ago in 2012, a British girl, Amina Al-Jeffery, was taken out of the UK, from her home in Swansea, and locked up in the country of her father’s birth, Saudi Arabia. Amina has been locked up for daring to become ‘Westernised’ for ruining the family honour and bringing shame on the family name. For the last four years that she has been forced to live in Saudi Arabia none of us had even heard of her. I hadn’t. Can you honestly say you had heard of her plight to return to Britain, to her home? Thanks to social media and the power of Twitter her plight has been heard and the High Courts have ruled that ‘the girl in the cage’ be returned to the UK by the 11th of September. Why not immediately? Four years is a long time to be imprisoned by her father, why have the courts not demanded she be released immediately?
Yasmin Khan, Director of the Halo Project, a national charity dedicated to helping the victims of forced marriage, honour based violence and female genital mutilation and the many issues that arise from these crimes, including kidnap, spoke about the case on BBC Live 5, on 3rd August 2016. Yasmin discussed the failures of safeguarding agencies in protecting the victims, the importance of safeguarding agencies working closely together to ensure the safety of victims. That we even have a case where there is a British girl, locked in a cage in Saudi Arabia is shocking.
Cases of honour crime are hugely under reported, Yasmin goes on to say, parents who are guilty of killing their child in the name of honour are never going to report the child missing are they?
If it hadn’t been for social media and Amina’s plea for help we would never have heard of her, she had friends she relied on to get her story out there. How many more Amina’s are out there, no one to tell their story.
Yasmin is spot on when she states that it should never have been allowed to get to this stage. This stage means that we have failed those we should have been protecting. It is important to take risks seriously and not ignore cries for help because you are scared of being labelled something. Helping and supporting girls and women live a life free of violence and honour killing only shows that you are a decent human being, there is nothing racist in empowering young girls and women.
I hope that Amina’s father does the right thing and returns her to home, in Swansea. I hope he is shamed by how much support his daughter is receiving, and sets her free. Sadly men’s actions are never deemed shameful nor is the burden of ‘honour’ placed on them. Amina’s father believes his daughter needs to stay locked up; no High Court hearing can make him change his mind. The British laws where his daughter was born matter not the laws in the land of his birth.
If the father held his beliefs in his actions and not in his mind, then he should respect the over-riding fact that Islamic law must be overseen by the law of the land and in this case UK Law should be implemented.
Published: May 17th, 2016 Updated: December 1st, 2021
Two 19-year-old girls have been found hanged after they were forced to marry against their will in India.
Police discovered Asha Shrikant Burud and Swati Umesh Zanjare hanging from a tree in a jungle and instantly described their deaths as suicide. The two young women were married off in a mass ceremony at the start of the month in Ambegaon taluka, western India, and had gone missing 10 days later.
Tragic: Police discovered Asha Shrikant Burud (left) and Swati Umesh Zanjare (right) hanging from a tree and instantly described their deaths as suicide
Their families, from the village of Asane, last saw them when they set off to gather wood and fruit in a nearby forest and reported them missing three days ago.
Police said they probably committed suicide because they were married off against their wishes.
Inspector Girish Dighavkar of the Ghodegaon police station said, ‘Based on the primary investigation, we believe that the two have committed suicide.
Published: May 13th, 2016 Updated: December 1st, 2021
An illegal immigrant from Nigeria was granted leave to remain in Britain after falsely alleging that her daughters would be subjected to female genital mutilation if they were sent back.
A high court judge ruled that the three girls, aged 13, 10 and seven, needed protection from their father after hearing claims he was making arrangements for them to be “cut”.
In a landmark case the girls became the first subjects of a female genital mutilation (FGM) protection order, by the British courts. But that decision has now been overturned after a different judge dismissed the claim, describing it as part of an “immigration scam”.
Parents who tried to take their daughter to Pakistan to see her dying grandparents have been fined after flouting the terms of a forced marriage protection order.
The family, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were ‘detained’ by police at the departure gate at Manchester Airport. They were trying to board a flight to Pakistan with their teenage daughter and other family members in July 2015.
Manchester and Salford Magistrates’ Court heard that the couple were in breach of a forced marriage protection order imposed at Manchester Family Court in March 2015. However defence lawyers for the family argued that the parents believed the order had been rescinded so the youngster could leave the country of her own free will.
The court heard that her mother had been acting on ‘egregious information’ from the police and social services.
District judge Samuel Goozee said there had been ‘a wholesale breakdown’ by the police, social services and the school in relation to the order.
Published: May 12th, 2016 Updated: December 1st, 2021
When she was 7 years old, Mariya Karimjee sat on a tarp in a neighbor woman’s living room and had an operation that would affect her life forever. As part of a family tradition in her small Dawoodi Bohra sect of Islam, Karimjee had part of her clitoris removed in a procedure that was meant to make it impossible for her to feel desire or “get turned on.”
Karimjee shared her story of slowly learning about what happened to her that day in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1995 on the radio program This American Life this week, and has written about her experience previously for The Big Roundtable. As she said in the recording, her mom referred to her budding sexuality and anatomy as a “bug” that needed to be taken out.
“According to my mother, a bug was growing in an egg down there — her language not mine — and that it would hatch and eventually crawl to my brain, unless we removed it,” Karimjee said. So her mother took her to the neighbor woman’s house, and she received a gold necklace with a teardrop pearl pendant as a gift afterward.
“For two days [after the operation], I wore what I can only describe as a big-girl diaper wet with blood,” Karimjee said. “Peeing was so painful that I tried to last for hours without going until my mother explained that I could give myself an infection. For the next year, I’d break out into a cold sweat whenever I saw the kind-faced woman who, on a tarp on her living room floor, had spoken to me softly as she took a knife and cut me.”
Published: April 22nd, 2016 Updated: December 1st, 2021
Anti-FGM campaigner Jaha Dukureh has been named one of the world’s most influential leaders by Time magazine alongside John Kerry, Angela Merkel, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bernie Sanders and Christine Lagarde.
Dukureh, the lead campaigner in the Guardian’s global media campaign to end female genital mutilation, was honoured in particular for her work in the US and the Gambia but is now campaigning to end the practice worldwide in a generation, using her experiences as a survivor to build public support.
She first came to prominence with the success of her change.org petition, which received more than 220,000 signatures, asking the Obama administration to conduct a new prevalence study into the current scope of FGM in the United States.
Now based in Atlanta, Dukureh has become the leading campaigner against FGM in the Gambia. She is of a new generation of young women in the country who are working through the media to make sure that the mutilation they have suffered is not repeated on their daughters.
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