‘Honour’ is still a killer

ISLAMABAD:

He saw his wife with another man and immediately suspected she was ‘betraying’ him. His ‘honour’ was hurt. He slit her throat and left her to die in their empty house. Then he fled the city.

This was the confession of Rab Nawaz — a man accused of killing his wife — given to the police. Nawaz, a resident of Sector G-7, was arrested from a hideout in the outskirts of the city last week.

Nawaz was Shaheena’s* second husband. They had married less than a year ago. The woman’s teenage son from her first marriage was also living with them in the house. He was the one who discovered his mother’s body lying in a pool of blood when he returned from work.

Nawaz was sent to jail by a court after he confessed to the murder. Before the police, the accused said he felt betrayed and started suspecting that his wife was a woman of ‘questionable character’ after he saw her in a car with a stranger.

When he asked her who the man was, his wife could not provide a satisfactory answer to him. But the police added that there was no witness to what his wife would have told Nawaz. The interrogators relied completely on the confessional of the accused.

But why did Nawaz kill her while he could simply leave her?

Police quoted the killer as saying he wanted to “avenge the breach of his trust”. He told the police that he loved her and had married her knowing that she was divorced and had a son. However, he felt “broken” and was enraged whenever he saw her with another man soon after their marriage. Nawaz said he had decided that he would kill her and had been looking for an opportunity ever since seeing her with a stranger in the car.

He told the police that his wife never listened to his pleas “to mend her ways”. He got the opportunity when she was home and her son was out.

Police said her son told the police that he found her mother dead when he returned home after work. He instantly knew that his stepfather was responsible. The two used to quarrel and fight over his mother’s “ways of living” very often, he also told the police.

He said that on the day the incident occurred, he left home at around 1:30pm, leaving his stepfather alone with his mother.

This was not the first incident of ‘honour-killing’ in the city, but it was certainly among the most gruesome. It also has lessons for certain people who think of their women as a source of “honour” rather than independent human beings and decide to unilaterally ‘punish’ them based on perceptions of ‘misconduct’.

Honour, is in fact earned by respecting life, not taking it.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 20^th, 2013.