The mother and sister of a British woman killed in Pakistan after she divorced and remarried without her family’s permission are wanted by the country’s police.
According to the Guardian, Pakistani authorities, who say Samia Shahid, 28, from Bradford, was the victim of a “premeditated and cold-blooded honour killing”, are already holding her father, Mohammad Shahid, and her ex-husband, Mohammad Shakil, in connection with her death.
Now her mother, Imtiaz Bibi, and sister, Madiha Shahid, have been declared as proclaimed offenders under Pakistani law, the BBC reports. Arrest warrants were issued after they failed to appear in court.
In a report into the case published last month, police claimed that Samia’s family colluded with Shakil to commit murder, then use Pakistan’s “blood money” laws to forgive him. Neither have yet been formally charged and both deny the allegations.
The declaration of Samia’s mother and sister as proclaimed offenders means that police believe they were also involved in her death and want to question them.
Almost two months ago, police released a 43-page report on the case alleging that Mohammad Shahid helped Shakil strangle Samia to death in the family’s ancestral village of Pandori, in the state of Punjab, on 20 July.
It claims that the father’s request for a post-mortem just two hours after Samia’s death was an attempt to rush the investigation so he could lodge a criminal case against Shakil, then pardon him a few days later.
Under Pakistan’s 25-year-old “blood money” laws, the guardians of murder victims can forgive their killers in return for compensation, even though family members often conspire with each other to commit such crimes.
The police report said the men could have successfully hidden the crime “in almost a perfect plot” were it not for the arrival in Pakistan the next day of Samia’s second husband, Mukhtar Syed Kazam, who immediately filed a criminal complaint.
It then emerged that Samia’s father had tried to conceal his daughter’s divorce and remarriage from police.
The two men appeared on Saturday at a court hearing in Jhelum, northern Punjab, where the case was adjourned until 11 November.