Licensed to Kill in Pakistan

ByABC News
July 31, 2002, 12:31 PM

Aug. 5, 2002 -- On a hot afternoon in April 1999 in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, Hina Jilani, a respected Supreme Court lawyer, was meeting with her client Samia Sarwar in her office when Sarwar's mother stormed into the premises accompanied by two men.

Sarwar, a 29-year-old mother of two, was seeking a divorce from her violently abusive husband. But her conservative family viewed the looming divorce as a slight against the family honor and Sarwar had told Jilani that she feared for her life.

It's the sort of threat that Pakistani lawyers dealing with women's issues take very seriously and on her part, Jilani was taking no chances.

Her client had fled her Peshawar home two months earlier and agreed to meet her mother with no male relatives present in the law offices to collect some documents needed for the divorce.

But when Sarwar's mother arrived at the offices that fateful afternoon, there were two men with her an uncle and another man, Habibur Rehman, who claimed to be their driver.

The next few moments have been imprinted in Jilani's memory forever, and more than three years later, the feisty activist vividly recounts the event.

"It was a horrible incident, just horrible," says Jilani in a phone interview with ABCNEWS.com. "They walked into my office it was after-office hours and I guess the security was lax. They entered the building, walked into my office and even as I asked the men to leave the room, the assassin (Rehman) shot her (Sarwar) in the head, killing her instantly. I was very close to her and I very nearly missed a bullet."

In the chaos that followed, a paralegal was used as a human shield to help the attackers escape.

"It was so shocking," says Jilani. "I had only been seeing the girl for a week not long enough to get to know her but I thought she trusted her mother."

That a woman could abet her daughter's murder rather than put up with the social shame and the sheer audacity of the attack in broad daylight, in a crowded city, in the offices of one of the country's most esteemed lawyers revolted many Pakistanis, but not all of them.

Some local commentators, especially from the remote tribal provinces of Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, argued that the killing was in accordance with tradition and therefore, not a crime. Their only reservation was that Sarwar family had not received a verdict to kill their daughter from a traditional tribal council, or jirga.

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Indeed, obtaining a jirga verdict to kill a woman accused of dishonoring her family and tribe is not a very difficult undertaking in Pakistan.

Although honor killings are illegal under Pakistani law, the impoverished South Asian nation has an extensive parallel tribal justice system that is allowed to operate in the tribal areas under legal sanction and functions illegally in other parts of the country mainly to settle family and property disputes.