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A Muslim man has confessed to strangling his 19-year-old daughter to death with his bare hands after learning from police she had been caught shoplifting condoms to have sex with her forbidden boyfriend.
Asadullah Khan and his wife Shazia then dressed dead daughter Lareeb, a dental technician, in her clothes.
They then wheeled her in a wheelchair from their high-rise apartment to the family car, drove to a secluded embankment in their home city of Darmstadt in Germany, and tipped the corpse down it.
Khan, 51, with tears streaming down his face, admitted the killing because in his eyes she had brought ‘dishonour’ on the family with her love for a boy he didn’t approve of. He and his wife were wed in an arranged marriage and he wanted the same for her.
Khan and his wife, originally from Pakistan, are on trial for murder at the State Court in Darmstadt. Shazia, 41, described how she was a downtrodden woman, totally in the thrall of her husband, and unable to save her daughter.
The court heard how the parents sent Lareeb’s sister Nida, 14, to a relative on the evening of the murder in January this year.
Nida gave evidence against both her parents, saying her mother was as strict as their father, often striking both of them.
The mother held out her arms to Nida when she appeared in court on Friday but Nida refused to acknowledge her.
Nida said: ‘My Mama was not suppressed, she could do what she wanted. She used to hit me with a stick.
‘We were never allowed to talk about her boyfriend. My father used to say my sister should be forcibly married in Pakistan.’
The court heard Nida is now in therapy and has nothing more to do with her parents.
Shazia said that on the night of the murder Lareeb had quarelled again with her father and hit him. He later crept into her room as she slept, knelt astride her and strangled her.
‘I couldn’t stop him,’ the mother said in a statement read by her lawyer. ‘I have rheumatism and didn’t have the strength to fight him off. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t.
‘Lareeb stayed away from the home for several nights in a row and stopped wearing the headscarf. One day we received a letter from the police saying she had been caught trying to steal condoms.
‘At this point it became clear that there was sexual contact. When I showed the letter to my husband he snapped.’
Killer Asadullah, who speaks no German, said he ‘loved’ his daughter.
The trial continues.
