LAHORE, Pakistan -- The Pakistani police said Friday that they had arrested four more people in connection with the death of Farzana Parveen, a pregnant woman fatally beaten by her family in a so-called honor killing.
After an urgent appeal for action from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the police Thursday arrested Parveen's uncle, two cousins and a driver employed by her family.
They are accused of being part of a crowd of about 30 men, said to have been led by her father and two brothers, who surrounded Parveen, 25, as she was bludgeoned with a brick outside the Lahore High Court building Tuesday. The police arrested her father, Muhammad Azeem, in the hours after the killing.
A senior investigator, Umer Riaz Cheema, said the four men arrested Thursday would be presented before one of the city's anti-terrorism courts, which have special powers to expedite criminal prosecutions. The provincial chief minister, Shahaz Sharif, said he had instructed the police to ensure the suspects would face justice as soon as possible.
The manner of Parveen's death has attracted global attention, highlighting both the brutality of honor killings and the apparent inability of the Pakistani police to protect vulnerable women.
According to human-rights groups, about 900 women died in similar circumstances in Pakistan in 2013, many beaten, stabbed, burned or shot.
Photos of Muhammad Iqbal, her grieving husband, hunched over a shawl that covered her body have fed the condemnation of honor killings, which often occur in rural areas when a woman marries a man of her choice in defiance of her parents' wishes.
But new details that have emerged in Parveen's case have suggested money was also a factor in her death and that her husband had killed a woman in the past.
Police records show that Iqbal, 45, killed his first wife, Ayesha Bibi, in October 2009. In a phone interview, Iqbal confirmed that he had killed Bibi and said he had done so to be with Parveen.
"I strangled her," he said, speaking from home in the Faisalabad district, west of Lahore. "I liked Farzana since she was a child."
Police investigators said Iqbal absconded after the 2009 murder and stayed with Parveen's family until he was arrested in April 2013. The police charged him with Bibi's murder, but he was released under an Islamic provision of Pakistani law that allows a convict to be freed upon payment of money to the victim's relatives.
Iqbal later asked for Parveen's hand in marriage from her father, who agreed in exchange for a dowry of about $800. But then, he said, the family requested more money and a dispute emerged.
With the matter unresolved, Parveen and Iqbal married in January. Parveen's family told the police that she had already been married to one of her cousins and claimed that Iqbal had kidnapped her.
The conflict Tuesday arose when a crowd of men from her family's village, led by her father and two brothers, surrounded her as she walked from her lawyer's office to the Lahore High Court.
She was going to the court, her lawyer later said, to give a statement that she had married Iqbal of her own free will.
Cheema, the police investigator, said one person fired a gun, and the bullet grazed her ankle. Then her father, Azeem, hit her with a brick taken from the roadside. Her brother Zahid, and a cousin, Mazhar Iqbal, joined in the attack, he said.
Muhammad Iqbal said he was also beaten by the men.
"When Farzana was killed, I fell on her body," he said. "But they pulled me off and started beating her body and her face with their shoes."
In the phone interview from his village in the Faisalabad district, Iqbal said his wife's family was still threatening him.
"They say they will kill me and remove her body from the grave and burn it," he said.
A Section on 05/31/2014