The prodigal daughter?

In early August, as the very successful Olympics Games were getting underway in London, another piece of news saddened and shocked many in the UK.

A Pakistani couple were convicted at Chester Crown Court of murdering their daughter, of whom they had come to feel ashamed because of her rejection of strict Islam and adoption of Western ambitions and attitudes. The man and wife were found guilty of the 2003 ‘honour’ killing of their daughter. They were told by the judge that they would serve at least 25 years in prison. It seems that they suffocated their 17-year-old by forcing a plastic bag down her throat in front of their four other children at their home in Warrington, after she rejected an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

For almost nine years the couple got away with the crime, accusing police officers of victimisation and racial and religious stereotyping for treating them as suspects after their daughter’s body was found months later in a river in Cumbria. The police were only able to bring charges when in 2010 one of the four children told them that she had witnessed the killing.