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The father of the young women from Terrassa murdered in Pakistan: "I have the dead daughters and the sons in jail"

2022-05-24T12:53:24.628Z


The victims, the sisters Arooj and Anisa, had left their Barcelona home after pressure from a brother, the alleged main perpetrator of the double crime


The six arrested for the murder of the sisters Arooj and Anisa in Pakistan;

the third from the left is Shehryah, brother of the victims and main defendant. PUNJAB OFFICIAL POLICE (Europa Press)

Ghulam Abbas drags his sad figure to the grocery store where he has been working for years.

There, his boss, Ulfad Raja, is waiting for him, who tries to lend him a hand in the worst tragedy of his life.

It is Monday night and Ghulam, 52, has just returned from the Mossos d'Esquadra police station in Terrassa (Barcelona), where he has not been able to testify because there was no Urdu translator.

He is the father of Arooj and Anisa Abbas, the 24- and 21-year-olds murdered in Pakistan for refusing to continue their marriages of convenience.

But he is also the father of two of the alleged killers: the Shehryar brothers and Asfandyar Abbas.

Ghulam, who has hardly eaten or slept since Friday, is confused.

“I have two dead daughters and two sons in jail;

I don't know what to think,” he laments.

Arooj and Anisa were allegedly brutally murdered by their husbands, brothers and other relatives in a small town in Gujrat, in the eastern province of Punjab, where the majority of Pakistanis residing in Catalonia come from.

There are six arrested for a double murder committed under the pretext of preserving the good name of the family.

In the so-called honor crimes -one of the faces of sexist violence- men of a family are usually involved who consider that another member, usually a woman, has dishonored them.

Ghulam covers his face with his hands and can barely verbalize how he feels, what he thinks or what decisions he is going to make from now on.

In the anxiety of these days he also remembers another son, his firstborn, who drowned in a river in Pakistan.

On Friday afternoon, Ghulam received the most unwanted call: his daughters had been murdered and two of his sons had been arrested for it.

Of what happened in the town of Mouza Nothia, he only knows what he has been told and what the Punjab police have officially explained: that the family set a trap for the young women with the intention that they return to Spain hand in hand of their husbands, that they refused and that for this reason they were beaten and shot to death while they slept.

But the Abbas story is a bit more complicated.

Ghulam arrived in Spain 13 years ago and began to work as much as he could with the intention of reuniting his family little by little.

Six years ago he settled in the business where he works today, a grocery store on Rambla Francesc Macià in Terrassa, a five-minute walk from his home.

“He always asked for more hours to charge more.

Here we tell him that he is like a donkey, because he does not stop working”, says the boss.

He combines this job with selling flowers in Barcelona, ​​where he travels by train.

With a bogus job contract for which he paid a fortune, he managed to bring him Arooj's daughter, who had married his cousin (Hassan) in Pakistan.

Later, due to family reunification, he managed to get Anisa, the other daughter, who was a minor at the time, to come to Catalonia.

When you turn 18,

Ghulam Abbas, father of the young women murdered in Pakistan, leaves the Mossos police station in Terrassa (Barcelona).CRISTÓBAL CASTRO

excess protection

Those marriages of convenience, arranged within the family, were more formal than anything else.

In Terrassa, thousands of kilometers from their husbands, Arooj and Anisa began to lead a life that did not please one of the brothers, Shehryah, who in the meantime had also settled in the town.

“The three loved each other madly.

They to him, and he to them.

For her wedding, Anisa wanted some 40 euro shoes, but her father, who is a bit stingy, told her no.

Shehryah asked me to take the father for a walk so he could buy them for him.

Now, suddenly, everything has been destroyed,” recalls the store manager, who also acts as an interpreter because Ghulam barely speaks Spanish.

Shehryah's supposed love sometimes translated into being overprotective of her sisters.

Anisa began to behave in a way that her family interpreted as a slight.

She left home a couple of times and started going out, in Barcelona, ​​with a Pakistani boy.

Shehryah confronted him and stabbed him.

Soon after, Arooj also left home.

"Ghulam wanted to prevent his son from killing someone, so he asked him to leave them alone, to make their own lives," says the father's boss.

Ghulam, the father, says that he had not had any contact with his two daughters for many months, although he hid these problems from his boss.

"When he asked about them, he told me that they were fine, at home," says Ulfad, the boss, who noticed how Shehryah stopped coming to the store, where she had also worked helping her father.

“I always made jokes with her hair, because she has very long hair.

For him the most important thing was her sisters, her hair and volleyball, he was crazy about that sport, ”he says about the man whom the Punjab police consider the main perpetrator of the double murder.

The two sisters killed, in a Punjab police image.

The final trip to Pakistan

The tension in the family had boiled over of late.

A few weeks ago, the mother and two children (Shehryah and Asfandyar) traveled to Pakistan, allegedly for a vacation.

It is not clear for now when or why the daughters arrived in the country.

In conversation with EL PAÍS, a Punjab police chief explained that, “according to the initial investigations”, the women were victims of a “trap”.

With the excuse of spending a few days in the town, they told them that they should return to Europe with their husbands because their status as residents in Spain – even though they do not have Spanish nationality – would help them obtain visas.

The pressure of families in these small towns can be suffocating, explains Ulfad, the father's boss.

Both girls refused to submit to these requests, always according to the police chief.

Not only did they not want to return with them, but they "asked for a divorce" to continue with their lives in Spain.

That rebellion was too much for Brother Shehryah, who had other plans.

He explained to his sisters that they wanted all of them –they, the mother and also the father– to live in Pakistan, while he himself and his brother Asfandyar would return to Spain.

They would work and send the necessary money remittances.

He would take care of everything.

But the sisters allegedly rejected the plan outlined for their lives and a storm was unleashed.

The result is that several relatives ended up participating in the crime, according to the police,

The six detainees, who "may face capital punishment", according to the police chief, are the two brothers of the victims, but also their husbands, an uncle-father-in-law and another relative.

The police do not rule out new arrests and hope to clarify the circumstances of the event.

In parallel, the Mossos d'Esquadra are also trying to find out what happened and, in particular, if the girls forcibly traveled from Catalonia to Pakistan.

For this they are taking statements from relatives.

This same Tuesday, Ghulam Abbas is again at the police station;

this time, with an interpreter.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-05-24

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