The six arrested for the murder of Arooj and Aneesa Abbas, at the Gujrat district police station in Pakistan. Punjab Police (EFE/Punjab Police)
Arooj and Aneesa Abbas, the sisters from Terrassa (Barcelona) murdered in Pakistan, fell into a trap hatched by their relatives.
The young women, aged 24 and 21, had married against their will with cousins from the Gujrat district, in the east of the country, but for years they had led their lives, away from their husbands, in Catalonia, where they had started other relationships sentimental.
Given their reluctance to facilitate the arrival of the spouses in Europe thanks to their status as residents, according to the Gujrat police, the family ordered them to travel to Pakistan on the pretext that their mother, Azra Bibi, was seriously ill.
It was not true.
“It was an intentional crime.
The family planned everything.
They set a trap for them, ”a spokesman for the Gujrat police, the district from which Arooj and Aneesa and a good part of the Pakistani migrants residing in Catalonia, come from.
The Pakistani newspaper
Dawn
advanced that the family contacted the girls to inform them that her mother was on her deathbed and wanted to see them in person.
One of the clues that leads to the conclusion that a plot was underway is that barely 24 hours passed, according to the police, from the time Arooj and Aneesa landed in Pakistan until they tried to strangle them and finally shot them dead while they slept.
The girls arrived in the country on Thursday and the event occurred on Friday, once both reported that not only did they not intend to bring their husbands to Europe, but they wanted to separate from them and marry other people in Spain.
Their rejection of the family's demands cost them their lives.
As often happens in this type of “honor killings” —of which almost 500 were recorded in Pakistan in 2021 alone—, the executioners were his closest relatives.
The two main defendants are Mohammad Hanif -uncle of both and father-in-law of Aneesa- and Shehryar Abbas, her own brother.
Shehryar had already been controlling in the time they all lived together in Terrassa, when the father, Ghulam Abbas -installed in Spain for 13 years-, managed to reunite them.
After being taken to Pakistan for her marriage to her cousin at the age of 18, Aneesa, her little sister, started dating another Pakistani boy in Barcelona.
According to various relatives, Shehryar assaulted the boy, prompting her father to intervene and ask him to let her sister live her life.
More than protecting Aneesa, these sources indicate, she wanted to prevent her son from ending up in prison.
Both Arooj and Aneesa, in fact, had left the family home due to conflicts with their brother and disagreements with their father.
Azra Bibi, her mother, continued to live in the family home, a small flat next to the grocery store where Ghulam works.
A few weeks ago, Azra and two of her children - Shehryar and Asfandyar, who is another of the six arrested for the double femicide - traveled to Pakistan.
The reason for that trip is one of the great unknowns in this case and, in fact, it is being investigated by the Terrassa Prosecutor's Office, which has ordered the Mossos d'Esquadra to take statements from various family members residing in Spain;
among them, the father.
Sources close to the father, who did not join that trip and remains in Terrassa, maintain that the family wanted to spend a vacation season.
Police sources, however, suspect that this movement was already part of the plan to put pressure on the sisters and get them to bring their husbands to Europe thanks to their long-term residence permits.
According to
Dawn
, as soon as she arrived in Pakistan, the mother was locked in a room and was not allowed to have any contact with the outside world.
The children, meanwhile, fraternized with the neighbors and played volleyball, as shown by TikTok videos that they themselves published.
At one point, she cast the lure.
The father assures that he did not know anything and that he was only informed that the daughters appeared on his behalf in Pakistan.
The double femicide has shocked the Pakistani community.
Various social and religious entities of that country installed in Catalonia expressed on Tuesday, in a statement, their "strong condemnation" of the "murder of two women", which they described as a "cruel act" that "no religion or society supports".
The entities recall that forced marriages "are totally prohibited both in the Islamic religion and in the Pakistani Constitution."
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