A 25-year-old woman was beaten and stoned to death in a so-called ‘honour killing’ by her family in Lahore, Pakistan, yesterday because she married a man without their consent.
Farzana Parveen had been engaged to Mohammad Iqbal for several years before they married, but her family never agreed to the union and filed an abduction case against Iqbal.
The woman was entering a courthouse on Tuesday to answer the abduction claim when relatives fired shots into the air and attempted to grab her. Her father, brothers and other relatives then began beating her, before grabbing bricks from a nearby construction site and stoning her to death.
Many onlookers witnessed the attack, and her father was immediately arrested for the murder, which a police investigator called a ‘heinous crime’.
‘I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,’ the father reportedly told police. She was three months pregnant, according to her lawyer.
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 869 women were murdered in honour killings in 2013. Many perpetrators of attacks in Pakistan against women are not adequately punished and, as a result, the majority of incidents go unreported.
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.