The wedding celebrations had just subsided when Muhammad Yousaf, his wife and daughter, all from Nelson in Lancashire, went to the dusty cemetery to remember the friends and family who had died since their last visit to Pakistan.
Although there had been talk of tensions with some relatives in the village because of the recent breakdown of their oldest son’s arranged marriage to a cousin from the same rural community around Jaurah near Gujrat in Punjab province, the atmosphere was one of apparent joy at the recent nuptials of their younger son, Asad. They had even decided to stay on for a few days and enjoy a holiday.
But as they offered up their prayers for the recent dead, four men who followed them to the graveyard opened fire with automatic weapons.
Mr Yousaf, 50, his wife, Pervaiz Bibi, 46, and their 22-year-old daughter Tanya, a mother of two young children back in Britain, died instantly in the hail of bullets. Another woman who was a distant relative was killed in the attack. Police said two of the gunmen were cousins of the dead couple and that the family were victims of an apparent honour killing.
Be the first to comment