The two sisters from Tarrasa (Barcelona) were called to Pakistan on the pretext that their mother was on her deathbed and wanted to see them. As reported on Tuesday by the newspaper ‘Dawn’, from Pakistan, the girls brutally murdered by their close relatives in Gujrat were victims of emotional blackmail that ended their lives.
It all started a couple of months ago, when Azra Bibi, the girls’ mother, traveled from Spain to Pakistan worried about the whereabouts of her youngest son, Fakhar Abbas. She had not heard from him for a long time, but she knew what it is to lose a child, since in 2015 the eldest brother of the family drowned in a canal at the age of 18.
Azra Bibi left her husband, Muhammad Abbas, in Spain and traveled to the town of Gujrat, in the province of Punjab, where a plot organized by some members of her family to assassinate her two daughters, Arooj and Aneesa Abbas, awaited her.
These girls had lived in the Catalan town of Tarrasa for years, they were against forced marriages with their cousins from Pakistan and had repeatedly demanded a divorce. This demand did not sit well with her family in Punjab, who wanted them to speed up the bureaucratic process for their husbands to move to Spain.
Thus, the girls’ two older brothers, Shehryar and Asfandyar Abbas, received their mother in Gujrat and held her incommunicado for another two months in order to worry their daughters.
Under the pretext of ‘defending their family’s honour’, they called Arooj and Aneesa and told them that their mother was very ill, that they should go to Pakistan right away to say goodbye to her. Once there, according to what a close relative of the victims told the newspaper ‘Dawn’, the deceased sisters were dragged by the suspects, they placed handkerchiefs around their necks to suffocate them and then they shot them. All in front of the children of the house.
Meanwhile, details are emerging about the circumstances of the death of the young women. “I have two dead daughters and two sons in jail: I don’t know what to think,” said Ghulam Abbas, the father of Arook and Anisa, late on Monday from Tarrasa. The father, with whom ‘El País’ spoke, comments that the two sisters left the home after continuous pressure from Shehryar, one of his brothers and the one who would be one of the main perpetrators of the double murder.
Ghulam confirms the version confirmed by the local press that the two young women were framed and that the relatives involved in their death wanted them to return to Spain with their husbands. Arooj was married to her cousin Hassan and Anisa to another cousin, Atiq. They, however, were in Pakistan and the two young women began to make their lives in Terrassa, which Shehryar did not like. Recently, the same media account, he traveled with his mother and another brother of his to spend a vacation. Later came the “trap” with which the young women went to Pakistan.
The father went to the police station to testify but was unable to do so because there was no Urdu translator. This Tuesday he has returned to the police headquarters again, already with an interpreter, to give a statement.
