Zahida Parveen, victim of horrible honor killing attempt


Parveen Zahida, says she had no inkling that her husband was jealous.

On the night of December 20, 1998, he woke her and ordered her into the common room of their three-room home in Sukho, a rural village about an hour north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.

There, Parveen, who was then three months pregnant with Iqbal's second child (but still weighed less than 100 pounds), saw a rope hanging from the raters, Iqbal, a stocky man, ordered Parveen to lock the bedroom door, but she refused, worrying that the children might wake up and call for her. "The kids are dead to you," he said. "You are no longer their mother."

Holding her captive, Iqbal accused Parveen of having an affair.

Parveen insisted that she had never been unfaithful to him, but Iqbal didn't listen. Instead, he gagged her, bound her feet and hands and hung her upside down from the ceiling. As he beat her with a wooden ax handle, blood began to drip from her arms and legs. Then Iqbal, a barber by profession, traded his ax for a razor. He cut off the lower lobes of her ears, then sliced her nose at the base.

"He next used a metal rod to poke out my eyes," she continues, "and then put his finger inside each socket to make sure nothing was left." Parveen hooks her skinny index finger in the air, makes a half-circle motion for effect and then holds her head with both hands as if the memory hurts. When Iqbal finished mutilating her, he cut the rope, causing Parveen to fall to the floor like a limp rag doll "He left me for dead," Parveen says, " and then he took our daughter and left."

Parveen crawled across the floor, found a blanket, wrapped it around herself and passed out.

When she came to, the next morning, she heard her son crying. Realizing he was locked in the bedroom, Parveen began to shout for help.

Two neighbors quickly arrived and, seeing the bloody mess, sent for the police. "They saw everything," Parveen explains. "The blood, the rope,. And I gave them a full statement."

The worst moment, however, was when Parveen's son saw his mother's body caked in blood, her face mutilated and oozing. He crouched in the corner and began to wail. There was nothing she could do to comfort him.