Anisa and Arooj Abbas, two sisters living in Terrassa (Barcelona), traveled last week to their country of origin, Pakistan, invited by relatives to spend a few days.
The women, aged 24 and 21, had been married the previous year - presumably against their will - to two of their cousins who live there.
Upon arrival, the family demanded that they take their husbands with them to Europe.
They refused and asked for a divorce.
Their refusal provoked the anger of relatives, who according to local police tortured and killed them on Friday night.
"They were strangled and fatally shot while they slept," Nauman Hassan, a spokesman for the local police, told the Efe news agency.
The events occurred in the town of Mouza Nothia, in the province of Punjab, where most of the Pakistanis residing in Catalonia come from.
The police arrested six suspects;
among them, the husbands of the victims.
According to a press release released by the body, the main person responsible for the crime is the brother of the victims, Shehryar Abbas.
"The sisters were honor killed," Hassan explained.
So-called honor killings often involve men in a family who feel that another member, usually a woman, has dishonored them.
The mother had traveled with Anisa and Arooj to Pakistan.
Despite the fact that she tried to avoid her murder, once it was completed, she avoided denouncing the relatives.
duel for femicide
The sisters did not have Spanish nationality, but they had lived in Catalonia for years, as confirmed by police sources and also by the Spanish Embassy in the capital of that country, Islamabad.
The Terrassa City Council is verifying that both were registered in the municipality and is trying to obtain official information about the events.
"If this is the case, we will activate the mourning protocol for femicide in the city," explained a spokeswoman for the Consistory.
Those arrested for the murder of the sisters, in an image released by the Punjab police.
Hassan, the Pakistani police spokesman, has assured that the young women fell into a "trap".
Anisa and Arooj were married "more than a year ago" to their two cousins, according to the pact between the families.
The purpose of the trip was to get both of them to intercede with the Spanish authorities so that they could “emigrate to Spain”.
The reality is that the sisters "wanted to get a divorce after the arranged marriage and wanted to marry others," the spokesman added.
What are known as honor crimes are common in South Asia and are usually committed by men of a family who come from what they consider an affront that contravenes the conservative family morals of local societies.
According to data from the NGO Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), 478 honor crimes were recorded in the country last year alone.
The Pakistani government approved in 2016 a law that prohibits the pardon of the relatives of the victims in this type of crime, a legal hole with which many men were free after killing a woman, generally a sister or a wife.
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