Parveen Bibi confessed
before a special court in the city of Lahore to killing her daughter in June
for "bringing shame to the family".
A mother who burned her
daughter alive as punishment for eloping with a man the family didn’t approve
of has been sentenced to death in Pakistan.
Police said 18-year-old
Zeenat Rafiq married Hassan Khan and lived with his family a week before she was
killed.
The court sentenced Rafiq's brother Anees to life in prison after the
evidence showed her mother and brother had first beaten her, before her mother
threw kerosene on her and set her on fire.
After Rafiq's murder in a
poor district of Lahore, none of her relatives sought to claim her body, police
said, leaving her husband's family to bury her charred remains after dark in a
graveyard near the city.
Violence against women is
rampant in Pakistan, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan.
It is believed there were
more than 1,100 honour killings in 2015, reports Daily Record.
Pakistan's parliament
passed legislation against the killings in October, three months after the
murder of glamorous social media star Qandeel Baloch whose brother was arrested
in relation to her strangling death in July.
Perceived damage to a
family's "honour" can involve eloping, fraternizing with men or other
breaches of conservative values.
In most cases, the victim
is a woman and the killer is a relative who escapes punishment by seeking
forgiveness for the crime from family members.
Under the new law,
relatives can forgive convicts in the case of a death sentence, but they would
still have to face a mandatory life sentence.
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