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The Prosecutor's Office accuses the father of the Terrassa sisters murdered in Pakistan of concocting the plan to kill them and "cleanse their honor"

2023-04-26T10:44:45.424Z


The public ministry says the man subjected Arooj and Aneesa to "regular ill-treatment" at home, which led one of them to attempt suicide


Ghulam Abbas did not kill his daughters, but "he hatched the plan" that led the two sisters from Terrassa (Barcelona) to their death at the hands of their relatives in a remote town in Pakistani Gujrat.

The Prosecutor's Office accuses the man, 53 years old and arrested last February, as an inducer of the double homicide, in May 2022, of Arooj and Aneesa, who were then 24 and 21 years old.

It also accuses him of forcing them to marry relatives, isolating them in the family home and subjecting them to "regular ill-treatment" that led one of them, Aneesa, to attempt suicide five years ago.

EL PAÍS has agreed to the investigation being conducted by a Terrassa court and which, until now, remained under summary secrecy.

The double honor killing of the Abbas sisters — a scourge that, in Pakistan alone, causes the death of half a thousand women each year — was materially executed by six people, including the husbands and two brothers of the victims, on May 20. of 2022. All of them entered prison in Pakistan and, although the authorities of the Asian country assured that they would continue there (the law provides, on paper, life imprisonment), several of them are already free.

In Spain, meanwhile, the Prosecutor's Office traced the family environment of the victims.

He listened to friends and young men with whom the girls had a relationship and studied various files found on mobile phones.

He came to the conclusion that Ghulam Abbas, who works in a grocery store very close to his house, had something to do with those two murders, even though he was not the actual perpetrator.

The man "he hatched, along with other relatives, a plan to deceive his daughters and make them travel to Pakistan in order to cleanse his honor," according to the complaint by the Prosecutor's Office.

In March 2022, he “decided to send his wife”, Azra Bibi, and her three sons to Nothia, the small town where the family comes from.

At the request of his father, his older brother, Shehryar Abbas,

she convinced them to fly to the country because she was getting married and because her mother was sick.

Although Arooj and Aneesa were “fearing reprisals”, they agreed to travel.

The Prosecutor's Office maintains that Ghulam Abbas participated in the murder of his daughters motivated by the logic of restoring the damage that the young women had supposedly caused to their families with their "defiant attitude".

Arooj and Aneesa "did not abide by their forced marriage and maintained a sentimental relationship with other couples" after leaving the family home in Terrassa, fed up with the suffocating control to which the father, with the help of the eldest son, subjected them.

The father arrived in Spain alone 14 years ago and settled in Terrassa.

He obtained a permanent residence permit in 2015. Little by little he was able to bring his family through family reunification.

Of the two murdered daughters, Aneesa, the youngest, was the first to arrive at just 16 years old.

In the Terrassa apartment where they lived, the adolescent "was permanently controlled by her father", who did not allow her to interact with people outside the "strictly family" sphere.

The girl could not leave the house if she was not accompanied by himself or her brother Shehryar.

Her father also subjected her "permanently to mistreatment."

He couldn't stand it.

In December 2018, when she had barely been in Spain for a year, she tried to commit suicide "by ingesting caustics."

married for papers

Aneesa's life had already been planned in advance without her.

In November 2019, at just 18 years old, her father took her to Pakistan to marry her "to a relative with whom a marriage of convenience had been arranged."

The girl never knew in advance the purpose of that trip.

The objective of her wedding with a cousin of hers was none other than "processing the residence permit for that Pakistani citizen."

Barely a month before, her sister Arooj had married, also to a cousin and for the same purpose.

After the double link, the family returned together to live in the small apartment in Terrassa.

The sisters helped their father in the grocery store and were victims, at home, of the same discriminatory treatment and mistreatment.

Until they got fed up.

The first to take the step was the youngest, Aneesa, who had endured the exacerbated machismo of her father for the longest time.

She left home and began a sentimental relationship with a Pakistani man who lived in Barcelona.

The older brother, Shehryar, ended up stabbing the groom in the street in what he considered an offense to the family's reputation.

The relationship between father and daughter broke down and the same happened with Arooj when she followed in the footsteps of her little sister and she left the house in early 2022, a few months before they both met her death.

She first lived in Valencia and, later,

The head of the Investigating Court number 3 of Terrassa, Sergi Casares Zayas, keeps Abbas under investigation in a case with great technical and legal complexity.

The double murder occurred in Pakistan, so the father, if his participation in the events is proven, could only be prosecuted as a "necessary cooperator", "inducer" or "mediate author", according to the hypotheses handled by the Prosecutor's Office, which does attribute full responsibility for three other crimes: a forced marriage (that of Aneesa, forced to move to Pakistan "through violence and intimidation"), habitual abuse in the family and coercion.

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Source: elparis

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