The father of Uruj and Anisa, the 21 and 24-year-old sisters murdered in Pakistan, disassociates himself from the trip to the Asian country, where they were murdered, after laying “a trap” for them, according to local authorities. So says Ulfat Raja, responsible for the grocery store where the father works. Of course, Raja points out to one of his brothers, that he is one of the six arrested for the crimes, and that he also worked in his store, which he says was “shy.”
According to his account, the control he exercised over the girls was such that a few years ago, he attacked one of his sisters’ boyfriends with a knife because she had a husband in Pakistan and did not accept the relationship.
Raja maintains that the young women left their parents’ house a year ago, and that since then they had no relationship with the father, whom he defends: “I told him that if he knew something and lied, they would catch him, but he assures that had nothing to do with it.
I don’t think I have any responsibility. I trust his word ».
Rehana arrived in Tarrasa (Barcelona), in 2008, from her native Sialkot (Punyab, Pakistan). On Tuesday, she was the only compatriot who joined the minute of silence, convened before the Municipal Council, after the murder of her sisters. The act of mourning was held while their father, Ghulam Abbas, gave a statement at the Mossos d’Esquadra police station, which is investigating whether relatives living in Spain participated in the deception so that they would travel to the Asian country, being aware that there they would end their lives, to prevent them from divorcing two cousins; what is known as an ‘honor killing’.
“Arranged marriages are common in my country, but forced ones are not, much less something like this happening,” says the woman, married to one of her cousins, also in an agreed union, as well as her children. “It wasn’t forced,” the parent clarifies, “before we asked them, and we told them that if they didn’t want to, they didn’t have to do it.” That is why she does not assimilate the murder of the sisters.
Rehana did not know them, she comments surprised, since she is part of the group of Pakistani women in the municipality, where 618 residents of this origin are registered –and they represent 0.28 percent of the total population–. Neither does Sanna, who is responsible for this group that meets at the Badr Mosque on Pearson Street. “We have asked and nobody knows anything about the young women or their family,” she says.
In the Sant Pere Nord neighbourhood, where the Abbas family’s apartment is located, a few meters from the supermarket where the father works, few remember seeing Uruj and Anisa, who had long since left their home, according to Ismael, neighbor on the same floor. «They lived next to us, in the 3rd 2nd. First the father moved, and a year later the mother arrived. He had seen them for a long time, and his brothers, since January or February, ”explains the boy, who found out about the crimes when a few days ago he ran into several cameras in the portal. “They showed me a photo and I couldn’t believe it…they were my neighbors.”
They were her neighbors until, tired of family control, they left the home.
Two of his brothers, now detained in Pakistan for their involvement in the murders, worked in a grocery store, also close to the building, although they stopped seeing them there about a month ago. Only the father remained on the floor.
Originally from the village of Nathia, near the city of Gujrat, in the province of Punjab, the young women had been forced to marry their cousins more than a year ago, but they wanted to formalize the separation, after meeting two young men in Barcelona.
They did not contact the Pakistani women’s association, nor is it known that they asked for help. On the lack of relationship with her compatriots, Huma Jamshed, activist and key figure in the fight against forced marriages in Catalonia, points to the control exercised by the men of her family over them.
After the Prosecutor’s Office initiated proceedings this Tuesday and ordered the Mossos to investigate whether any crime had been committed in relation to the crime in Spanish territory, the Catalan Police called the relatives of the victims who reside in the municipality to testify.
After Ghulam Abbas, one of the young women’s brothers and an uncle went to the police station, while yesterday it was the turn of Ulfad Raja, head of the grocery store on Rambla Francesc Macià in Tarrasa, where the father of the victims works.
The Mossos are now trying to determine if any of the relatives acted as a necessary collaborator in both murders by persuading or deceiving the sisters to travel to Pakistan, knowing what their end would be.
This would be the only prosecutable crime in Spain, since the crimes were perpetrated in the Asian country, where local authorities arrested six suspects, including two brothers from Uruj and Anisa, who would have convinced them to travel there after concoct a plan: retain her mother to convey to the young women that she was on her deathbed and wanted to see them one more time. Something that was not true.
Now, the main obstacle for the Catalan Corps to determine if any of the relatives living in Spain participated in said ruse is the lack of agility in coordination with the Punjab Police, in charge of the case, and that the Mossos still They have not received the murder report or the autopsy report. “The procedures are not being agile,” indicate sources from the Catalan Police.
Having access to the details of the investigation is key to the progress of the investigations in Spain, since both the victims’ maternal uncle and his older brother, Shehryar, confessed, after being arrested in Asian territory, to having set a “trap” to young women. The only reason both gave for killing them was that they wanted to marry other people in Spain.
