[narrator] Every 90 seconds, someone is reported missing.
Many return to their families,
but for others, something has gone seriously wrong.
A 17-year-old girl has disappeared.
It was strange that she wasn't appearing anywhere on CCTV.
[narrator] It's a case defined by a wall of silence.
You just didn't talk about it anymore.
If they speak out, then they put themselves at risk.
[narrator] What happens in the police investigation that follows?
[woman] The longer the investigation went on,
the less chance that she would be found alive.
[narrator] What happens to the family at its heart?
There might have been tensions at home.
Perhaps she had run away.
She needed an escape.
And for her, her escape was, "I'm gonna drink bleach."
[narrator reading]
[somber music playing]
Shafilea Ahmed's story is almost identical to my story,
I have to say, growing up.
So this was me, you know, 39 years ago.
In the photos that we see of her, she's just got a lovely smile.
She just comes across as a beautiful young girl
with lots of promise ahead of her.
She had a close circle of friends.
She was very popular with her classmates.
She was bright.
Her ambition was to be a lawyer.
She wanted to be a barrister.
Shafilea was very ambitious.
She talked about wanting to go to university.
And those are all very aspirational things,
and also things which unfortunately horrified her parents.
[Darshna] Her parents were originally from Pakistan,
from the Gujrat region.
They had five children, four girls and one boy.
Shafilea was the eldest.
Her dad had actually come to the UK before her mum
and he had settled here and actually married a white lady
and had a son with her.
And he later entered an arranged marriage with his cousin, Farzana.
He went off to Pakistan, married again,
came here with Farzana, and settled down.
And we don't know how much he ever told people of this previous former life.
By all accounts he used to go out drinking,
he would go out to clubs, he would go out to discos.
Yet he kept all of this very quiet.
It was so far removed from the life that he built with Farzana
and the life that he tried to impose on his children.
The father was insistent that, in short,
his daughter would live her life his way.
And if that wasn't acceptable
then there would be repercussions.
Shafilea had a westernized lifestyle.
She went to a local school.
She had friends who were not Muslims.
There appeared to be a conflict.
Her mother's attitude to the way the family should behave
was very much that of the way a family would behave in rural Pakistan.
She wanted to bring that sense of Pakistan
and that culture here to Warrington with her.
[Shahin] There is a focus on what other members of the community
think of the family.
There's a lot of emphasis on the honor of the family.
And you have people in the community
that would call each other and say, "Look at how your daughter dresses,
look at what she's doing, look at who she's hanging around with."
Things that can bring shame are things like integrating.
And I mean integrating, even talking to white people,
seen as "the other."
My mother would say that to me very clearly.
Things like cutting your hair, wearing makeup,
going out with your mates,
having a mobile phone, social networking.
All these things can be deemed as shameful behaviors.
If you don't conform to their expected level of behavior,
you end up feeling that, "Well, I must be a bad Muslim,"
"I must be a bad Sikh," a bad daughter even.
[Shahin] It's just a social phenomenon
that people kind of tie in with religion
but really it's more a cultural thing.
Whether people see that as a positive or a negative,
that's for them to decide.
[Jasvinder] Being born in Britain,
getting to a certain age in your life
where you are told that you're behaving too westernized,
that you have to be really careful about who you go out with, what you wear.
And you're expected to behave in a certain way
because by the age of 11,
you understand that that's shameful.
She was interested in makeup, fashion,
all the kind of things that young teenage girls are interested in.
And she had tried to express this.
She had tried to wear clothes that she wanted to wear,
she was, you know, interested in talking to boys,
although her family would never allow that.
Shafilea did have relationships with boys.
Obviously, you go to school with them,
you get to know people, and she was, texting them.
But of course all of that had to be hidden.
It couldn't be on her mobile phone in case her parents would check it.
So that kind of aspect of her life was very well-hidden.
It was almost an uncomfortable feeling being around the family,
'cause they seemed to be very controlled
over everything they said or the conversations they had
or what other family members would be doing.
She was reporting from a very young age,
"Yeah, I am being abused by my mother and father.
My mother calls me a prostitute, a whore."
She came to the attention of Social Services
because she had run away for the day.
So all the time underneath this sort of very respectable veneer
there were hints that things weren't quite right.
[gentle music]
[narrator] Shahin knows two of Shafilea's sisters
from going to the same mosque as children.
There was physical beatings.
There was a lot of emotional abuse going on.
There was a lot of isolation from Shafilea
where she wouldn't be allowed to sit with her siblings,
where she'd be locked in the room or even outside.
When Shafilea was in the garden,
they would try and pass food to her, you know, without her mum seeing.
Shafilea's siblings were aware that the tension was increasing.
They knew that her parents were becoming more and more angry at her behavior.
They were, you know, insisting
on picking her up from college, on bringing her home,
checking what she was wearing, checking what was in her bag.
They didn't want her wearing makeup.
She'd have to wipe it off before she got home.
So her siblings were witnessing this day in, day out.
A victim of honor abuse
doesn't actually believe they are being abused
because they're conditioned to believe this is normal.
Believing that you're the perpetrator,
that you're doing this to your family.
And your family will make you feel that.
Sometimes her parents kept her at home until the bruises went down.
But she did sometimes go to school with bruises.
Her reporting was very brave
because Shafilea would have been taught,
just like me, to be silent.
That speaking outside of the family is disrespectful.
And, indeed, every time she did speak outside the family,
the risk to her escalated in terms of the abuse towards her.
Every day she had to go back home to her parents,
to the people who were making her life such a misery.
[Shahin] Shafilea wanted to escape from home.
Life for her just was absolute hell.
Which is why she'd run away.
They kind of set the bed up
to look like Shafilea was still in bed,
but they helped her get her stuff out of the window and climb out.
But she was made to feel guilty and that's why she went back.
The power of this concept called honor keeps her oppressed.
Our victim is deprived of any rights,
freedom, or independence, believing that is normal.
And if that behavior is reinforced
by you being told this is part of your religion,
your tradition, and your culture,
you end up believing it even more.
What they're defending is what is normal to them
because they've never had a counter-narrative.
And if somebody says, "Well, what, you're marrying a stranger?"
Or, "What, you're not allowed to go out with white people or your mates?"
They would say, "Well, you don't understand
because you're not from that background and that culture."
[Shahin] Yes, you're supposed to teach them right from wrong,
but it's not for you to take away their freedom
and their happiness and kind of put them in this cage.
It makes me really, really angry.
[somber music]
[Jasvinder] By the time she gets to the age of 16 years old,
there came a point where she's saying, "They'll take me abroad
"and they're gonna force me into a marriage."
So her reporting changed.
Her life is mapped out for her.
You know, it's dishonorable to have ambition.
Who do you think you are?
You're thinking above your own station here.
You're getting married off.
[tense music]
[Helen] The family eventually decided
that they would deal with her by taking her to Pakistan.
[narrator] 16-year-old, Shafilea Ahmed
has been struggling to conform to her parents' expectations.
It seems they are determined to bring her into line
by going to extreme measures.
They arranged a family holiday to Pakistan
to attend the wedding of a relative over there.
The only way that her parents could get her onto that plane
is by giving her sleeping tablets.
And we think that Iftikhar
had been prescribed sleeping tablets for insomnia.
And then what he then did was crush these up
in some fruit juice and give these to Shafilea.
Shafilea was desperately unhappy in Pakistan. She wanted to escape.
Her mum and dad had her passport.
Scared to death that they might marry her off.
The intention was always that Shafilea would stay in Pakistan.
There wasn't any intention of bringing her back.
She's being punished, she's being taught a lesson.
So she has no way out whatsoever.
You can't run out of the front door in this village,
because everybody will spot you
and they'll send you straight back to your house. There's nowhere to go.
[dark introspective music]
Her parents are there, the family are around her.
They'll all be thinking the same thing.
"You bad human being, how dare you do this to this family?"
And there was talks of a marriage to one of her cousins.
Shafilea, because of the way she behaved,
the chances of marrying her off
became more and more remote.
Because within the community in which they lived,
she was regarded as a rebellious daughter.
[Jasvinder] You end up feeling suicidal.
And there are higher tendencies for South Asian women in Britain
aged between 16 to 24 years old
to self-harm or have suicidal tendencies,
which are three to four times higher than the national average.
She needed an escape.
And for her, her escape was, "I'm gonna drink bleach."
"Because it's hopefully gonna end all of this."
It speaks to that isolation, that "Where do I turn?"
There's nowhere to go.
[tense music]
She's so desperate that she drank bleach
because she didn't want to be married off to somebody of her parents' choosing.
She suffered huge injuries.
She had to have hospital treatment for this.
She had severe burns in her throat, in her esophagus.
She can't be married off in Pakistan because she's damaged goods at that point.
After Shafilea had drank the bleach,
her dad left her there and came back to the UK.
He cashed in her ticket and asked for a refund.
He got 250 pounds back for her ticket.
And for a couple of months, he stayed here whilst Shafilea was in Pakistan.
Her injuries are so severe that they can't adequately be dealt with
by the Pakistani medical system.
And so the family in Pakistan
basically get in touch with Iftikhar and say, you know,
"You've got to take this girl home."
All of her throat was completely burnt from the bleach.
She was very much skin and bones.
It was only when Shafilea was getting worse and worse
that they were forced to buy a return ticket.
[Darshna] She has a hospital stay for a number of weeks.
Of course, the nurses, all the medical staff,
they all had questions, "How on earth did you come to drink
this bleach in Pakistan?"
And the story was told that actually
she drank it by accident and she thought it was mouthwash.
That was the story her parents told everybody,
and they made sure that was the official story.
Her parents sit around her bed, day and night.
To the health professionals, what loving parents.
In fact, what her parents were trying to do
was to sit there and guard her.
One, she's not telling anybody what happened in Pakistan,
and she doesn't.
And secondly, she's not leaving without them.
And she leaves with them.
People were not seeing the parents as perpetrators here,
and that young girl is sent back to her family home.
The place that is unsafest.
[Shahin] She wanted to go back to school
and her parents wanted to stop that.
So there were calls being made from school.
All her friends would come and knock on for Shafilea.
She wasn't allowed to have any contact with them.
She wasn't allowed a mobile phone.
If people came to the door, they would very quickly be told to go away.
And she was just isolated from that moment on.
Her parents thought that far from being subdued,
she was returning to what they regarded as her bad old ways.
[dramatic music]
[Darshna] Once again, all the tension started.
They wanted her to wear traditional clothes.
And so the arguments started again, the abuse started again,
until eventually in 2003, she suddenly disappears.
Shafilea had run away before.
And so they simply told everybody that she had run away again.
Her best friend, Melissa, notices that she's missing.
School noticed that she's missing.
Rumors were starting to go around the school.
People were starting to talk about the fact that, you know,
her parents had done something to her
and that she'd never be seen again.
[eerie music]
A couple of times Shafilea's sisters had gone to school
and told her friends that her parents had killed her.
They had actually said this in school.
But then they laughed it off, said,
"We're joking, we don't know where she is."
It was the school who eventually reported
that she was failing to turn up for school.
The fact that a teacher had raised suspicions
I think says a lot that the teacher
has more of an interest in Shafilea's welfare.
And that led to the police becoming involved
in what was a missing person inquiry to start with.
[suspenseful music]
The police had interviewed her parents,
her teachers, her friends,
tried to find out what had happened to her.
[Helen] They became more and more aware
as they made inquiries of her friends and her school
that there had been issues between Shafilea and her parents.
They had started to look at CCTV footage.
And what the police were saying very early on
was that it was strange that she wasn't appearing anywhere on CCTV.
It was simply as if she had vanished without a trace.
When I first got interested in the story,
and I actually went and knocked on the family's door
and introduced myself to the family
and asked them about Shafilea, you know,
"Are you worried about her, what's going on?"
They said to me, "Well what was the point? The police can't find her.
"The police have just said to us, 'She's run away before,
she's just run away again, she'll come home eventually.'"
They just simply shrugged their shoulders and said, "Oh, well."
Shafilea's father was asked the question.
Now this is a strict Muslim man
that we understand had raised his daughter in this way.
When he was asked the question,
"Why didn't you report your daughter missing?"
His response, for me, rang alarm bells immediately, which was,
"Well I just thought that she was at her boyfriend's house."
If your daughter's running around with a guy,
it's just seen as a very shameful thing.
[Jasvinder] Alarm bells just rang for me.
You don't even look at a boy, let alone date a boy.
The family had said that perhaps she had run away with her boyfriend,
but they couldn't name that boyfriend.
None of her friends knew that she was planning to run away.
This time she hadn't said anything to anybody.
It seemed that there was just no evidence
that she had run away at all.
[Shahin] That's kind of the story
that the community believed in, actually.
This is just Shafilea just running off,
and, you know, disrespecting her family.
[Darshna] They seemed less concerned with the fact that Shafilea was missing
and more concerned with how people were portraying them.
Partly, I feel, they felt that because I was an Asian reporter
that I would understand their concerns about stereotyping,
about the way that their story was being portrayed.
And that might be partly why they let me into their home.
[tense music]
[Shahin] The feeling was that Mr. and Mrs. Ahmed
were kind of the victims of Shafilea's behavior.
Everybody just felt more sympathy
towards Mr. and Mrs. Ahmed in the community.
So they kind of saw it as an invasion
that the police were asking all these questions,
that there was all this media interest.
[narrator] Shafilea's parents' version of events
is not ringing true with the Cheshire Police.
The feeling was, amongst the investigating officers,
that they were not showing the concern
that parents would normally show in those circumstances.
They started to look at Shafilea's bank accounts
and realized that she hadn't withdrawn any money,
nothing had been touched.
And so the police start to grow increasingly suspicious about the family.
[narrator] The Ahmeds are unhappy with how their story is unfolding in public.
The dad was very angry about the way the press were writing about it.
He seemed less angry about the fact that his daughter was missing.
And because they were so defiant
in the face of the press and in all of their interviews,
I was always intrigued as to what exactly their role had been in her disappearance.
And I tried to keep an open mind through it all.
[narrator] Shafilea's parents go on the offensive
and hire a lawyer.
The family approached me, and they were obviously concerned,
as I understood it, that their story wasn't being put,
the story was being distorted.
They believed that they were being labeled,
even at that early stage, as an honor killing.
They believed it was racially motivated.
There might've been tensions at home, there might've been an unhappiness,
and perhaps she had run away.
Their account was put as succinctly
and as fairly and as transparently as possible,
and that's exactly what we did.
[narrator] With Shafilea's parents pursuing their own agenda,
police step up their investigation.
[Helen] Police, when they're investigating honor abuse cases,
it's unlikely they're gonna get evidence from within the family.
So they have to think about other tactics,
you know, covert tactics.
Police had consent
to put a covert listening device into the family home.
And they put a number of bugs into the home and also Iftikhar's taxi.
So on some of the recordings, we hear Iftikhar saying
that even if he had killed 40 people,
the police couldn't prosecute him unless there was evidence.
And although you might think that it sounds really incriminating,
that in itself isn't evidence.
[Helen] And they did hear some very interesting conversations,
but there was never an explicit admission.
And it certainly wasn't enough to charge the parents.
Shafilea's investigation took a long time
in terms of gathering evidence and identifying potential suspects.
[Helen] The longer the investigation into the missing person went on
the less chance that they thought there would be
that she would be found alive.
[Darshna] As the weeks went on, the coverage
about Shafilea's disappearance started to change.
It went from being about a missing person
to possibly about a girl who had been killed.
And headlines started to appear about a so-called honor killing.
And this is when the family start to change,
because we see them becoming more and more defensive.
They were so angry about the fact
that they had been linked somehow to Shafilea's death.
[Milton] I did resent that at the time, I have to say.
I was very anxious, as a Jewish person to be frank,
that they were not tarred with that
without proper investigation, without proper proof of it.
I didn't want to believe it
because I didn't want English people to believe
that Asian people then generally behave in that way.
I say that from an ethnic point of view.
I was desperately keen to put their side of the story
because I hoped that they were telling the truth
because I knew what the repercussions were,
that then those with racist tendencies
would use that as their vehicle
for then generalizing and saying, "We told you so."
The police started to hold press conferences
where they wouldn't invite the family.
This seems to have been a deliberate tactic,
not consulting with the family to appeal for information.
On one occasion in a press conference,
suddenly in bursts the family.
Iftikhar and Farzana marched into that press conference.
Then all the cameras turned to them
and they basically accused Cheshire Police of being racist.
Now, it was absolutely a shock to hear that.
You know, it was a very unusual tactic.
Police very quickly disappeared from that press conference.
What they're actually doing is using that
in order to put Cheshire Police on the back foot.
I do not like racism of any sort.
And this was potentially a vehicle
for people to express that.
And their solicitor gave a very combative press statement
where he accused the police of Islamophobia,
he accused them of racial stereotyping.
He said that the parents were extremely angry
at the way that suspicion had fallen on them.
I, in a sense wrongly I think,
I saw it as a campaign, really, as well as defending them.
It was very close to my heart in that sense.
[Jasvinder] They were trying to hide behind culture and race,
and we hear this all the time in cases.
And this is where professionals are feeling really concerned
about being called a racist.
And then they get more concerned
about not wanting to tread on cultural toes.
It seemed now that there were open hostilities
between the police and the family.
You know, without naming them publicly,
the police made it very clear that they felt she had been murdered.
This is now what people believed had happened to Shafilea Ahmed.
[tense music]
[narrator] It's 2004.
16-year-old schoolgirl Shafilea Ahmed disappeared five months ago
and the police investigations have drawn a blank.
Finally, there's a discovery
which breaks the case wide open.
Five months after Shafilea went missing,
up in Cumbria in the Lake District,
a couple of workmen came across a body
that had been washed up.
[melancholic music]
There'd been flooding in the area.
The remains had obviously been there for some time
and so the body was decomposed.
Investigations to identify the body took place.
And obviously there was forensic examination,
DNA comparisons, and it was confirmed to be Shafilea.
Circumstances in which the body was found
indicated that she had been murdered.
So this was no longer a missing inquiry,
this was now a murder inquiry.
[Helen] A body is not dumped over a wall in the Lake District
if the circumstances in which that person met their death are not suspicious.
The flood waters had dislodged certain parts of the body,
so it was not all together in the same place.
Very distressing for all involved.
Forensically, there was nothing that the remains could tell us
about how she was killed.
There were no obvious broken bones.
No obvious injuries to the skull.
And so the speculation
was that the most likely cause of death
would be either strangulation or suffocation.
[intriguing music]
When Shafilea's body was found, it changed everything.
The way her body was found, it was in a really, really horrible way.
And that she must have had a really horrible death.
It really upset me that somebody in the community
had died, and died in such a horrific manner.
[Helen] So they arrested the parents
on suspicion of murder and interviewed them.
But at that point,
there was insufficient evidence to charge them.
So they were released on bail
pending a continuation of the investigation.
[tense music]
The Crown Prosecution Service and a QC leading counsel
expressed the view that evidence would become available in the future
if one of the family was prepared to break ranks
and tell the truth about what had happened.
[Jasvinder] Here is a family that shut down.
The community shut down.
The wall of silence comes up from family and community
because they will collude, they will conspire.
Witness intimidation in these cases is very, very high.
Families will come together and they will decide
how they're going to deal with the person who's dishonored the family,
in this case it was murder for Shafilea Ahmed.
But then, after that, they will collude again and conspire,
"How are we going to keep the professionals on the outside?"
And they will all have been told how to do that.
So the police are up against that silence.
[Darshna] Shafilea's brothers and sisters
are giving the police the same story as Farzana and Iftikhar, her parents.
They're all saying that Shafilea ran away from home as far as they know,
that they didn't see anything else happen to Shafilea,
and that's what they believe. And that's what they're telling the police.
Lack of cooperation from family members, from community members.
Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, et cetera.
So building a case on the basis of that is very difficult to do.
I first heard about Shafilea's body being found
through the news, like most people.
And what I felt angry about was,
where were the people in the community coming out to say this was wrong?
[Shahin] Whoever had thoughts on Mr. and Mrs. Ahmed's involvement,
they wouldn't voice them.
The only thing that really changed in the community is
that you just didn't talk about it anymore.
Where's the religious leader?
I didn't hear them and I didn't see them.
None, nobody, which is why it was important for us
to come out and speak.
It was never about the family and how they felt they were victims
of the police or the whole process,
it's just, you have to remember who it's about
and it's about Shafilea.
[narrator] Shafilea's funeral takes place in August, 2004.
It is well-attended by family, friends, and the local community.
They knew it could have been the parents.
They didn't say that, I didn't hear that loud enough.
There was no outcry in that Muslim community.
Here is an opportunity for you to reinforce
that this is not part of religion.
You know, it's not part of one's traditional culture.
This is abuse.
In fact, all their silence did was reinforce the message
that if you behave like Shafilea, you should know better.
So thankfully Cheshire Police continued their investigation
and throughout the number of years we continued to keep
Shafilea Ahmed's face in the public domain as a charity.
That was important.
[narrator] Over time, the truth about Shafilea's abuse
becomes an unbearable burden for one of her sisters.
[Shahin] For one reason or another, she had started opening up to me
about when Shafilea would be locked outside.
She was telling me about how Shafilea would quite often be beaten up,
how Shafilea wasn't allowed to do anything.
And then it became clear to me actually just what life was like at home.
She'd had a very similar life to what Shafilea did
in terms of everything was controlled.
She would, you know, be watched if she went outside of the house.
Her mobile phone would be controlled late at night.
The one thing I really understood was this girl needs help.
This girl really needs to get away.
And that was always the underlying, you know, tone of all the conversations,
all the discussions that we had
is that ultimately she needed to understand
that she can't live like that.
[tense music]
We didn't have this friendship
where you have all these great memories for things that you did together.
Our friendship was based on the fact
that she opened up to me about things that went on at home.
And I was kind of the person she would turn to
when things got really bad.
Siblings watching this behavior of parents punishing one of their sisters
is a very difficult position for them,
because if they speak out, then they put themselves at risk.
She had a genuine fear for her life.
[Shahin] We were always afraid that something would happen to her,
or if her mum and dad had found out about her speaking to me
that actually it would be both of us
in a situation where something might happen.
We believed that.
[suspenseful music]
[Darshna] Over the next few years, things seemed to quieten down.
There's no new evidence.
There was an inquest, five years after Shafilea had died, in 2008.
And the coroner concluded that he believed she had been murdered
in the most vile circumstances possible.
And he all but pointed the finger at the family.
And what's astonishing here, again,
is that instead of just keeping his head down,
Iftikhar challenges this.
You know, he tried to take the coroner to court,
he tried to bring out a judicial review against the coroner's findings.
[tense music]
Iftikhar and Farzana came to believe
that they had got away with murdering their own daughter.
You know, the police investigation didn't seem to be going anywhere.
There was less and less press coverage about this.
But then something strange happened in 2010.
[narrator] It's seven years after Shafilea disappeared.
Could a bizarre sequence of events produce the breakthrough in this case?
There was an armed robbery at the family home.
Some people had broken into the home, tied up the parents,
and robbed them of jewelry and a large amount of cash.
Three males had turned up at the house
and were carrying what appeared to be a gun.
[Darshna] And I was astonished when they said to me,
"We believe it was her sister's friends,"
Shafilea's younger sister. And so I asked them
"What, you mean your own daughter robbed you?"
[suspenseful music]
[narrator] The parents of murdered teenager Shafilea Ahmed
have accused their second daughter of robbing them.
[Darshna] They believed she herself had orchestrated that robbery at their home.
They started telling me about the fact
that she had fallen in with a bad crowd, which struck me as very odd
because this is exactly what they used to say to me about Shafilea.
She was arrested.
It was during the course of that interview that she asked
to speak to police officers about another matter.
For years her family had been saying to her
to keep her mouth shut, not to tell anybody.
They'd been threatening her.
And in the end it was just too much, you know,
any girl to live with this when you're just 16 years old.
And she indicated then that she was prepared to talk to them
about what had happened to her sister, Shafilea.
She was the first member of the family to break ranks.
Yeah, there was a real internal struggle going on for her.
That ultimately, that struggle,
led to her telling the truth about what she had witnessed.
[Darshna] That's when everything came out.
She told a very distressing story
about what happened in their home the night Shafilea was killed.
She made a statement, a very detailed account
of the circumstances in which her parent had killed her sister, Shafilea.
This was what they had been waiting for all of these years.
The police had the evidence that they needed
to charge their parents with murder.
[Helen] It was not entirely clear, right up to the first day of the trial,
whether she would actually open her mouth and say anything.
But she did.
She was a key prosecution witness.
She took the stand and she gave testimony to Shafilea's life.
[Helen] She was screened from her parents.
The jury could see her.
They were absolutely gripped by what she was saying.
She gave an account of how her mother had gone to collect Shafilea
from her part-time job in a call center.
Shafilea was apparently wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt,
was showing her arms, and this had upset her mother.
[Darshna] The mum had told her off, had called her names, had said,
"How dare you wear such clothes?"
When they got home, that argument continued.
Iftikhar, the dad, had got involved.
Farzana suddenly decided that she'd had enough.
And she said words to the effect of, "Let's finish it here."
She described how Shafilea was held down
by her parents on a sofa.
A plastic bag was stuffed into her mouth.
They put their hands over her mouth and nose,
so she was effectively being suffocated.
And the children, who were all present,
watched their parents kill their sister.
She described in great detail how Shafilea kicked her legs
and how actually as she was losing control,
she urinated on the sofa.
And just the detail of how she saw her sister die
was so compelling that it was quite clear
she was telling the truth about what she'd seen.
It was obvious in court listening to the evidence
that Shafilea's death had a huge impact on her brothers and sisters
and it was extremely harrowing for them.
They had to live with this terrible burden
and this terrible guilt of what they had witnessed.
They would have been given
a message in witnessing that murder.
One, you don't tell anybody what you saw.
Two, if you do, this is what will happen to you.
She was offered protection from her family.
[tense music]
The trial was receiving quite a lot of publicity nationally.
And police were contacted
by a young woman called Shahin Munir.
She thought she had information
which would be useful to the police investigating the case.
And by this time, the trial was well underway.
[Helen] The police met with Shahin.
And Shahin told them that she had been so impressed
by her courage in coming forward to give evidence
that she felt that she wanted to tell the police what she knew.
[narrator] Years ago, there was one thing
Shafilea's other sister couldn't say out loud.
I suggested to her, "Then write it down in a letter."
At that point, I did have an inkling that it would be about Shafilea.
I knew this was a big thing for her.
I knew it took a lot for her
to actually be able to trust me to this extent.
She messaged me saying that, "Okay, I've written it down."
She was going to town that day with her mum
so I kind of got there first.
And as they walked past, she dropped the letters behind her.
Without her mum seeing, I picked them up and I left as quick as I could.
In fact, I didn't even look at them until I got home into my bedroom.
And I sat in my bedroom and I remember
I sat cross-legged and I started opening the letters.
[melancholic music]
[Helen] She had disclosed to Shahin Munir
that she had been present
when her parents had killed her sister.
Yeah, so it just describes the night she was murdered.
They sat Shafilea down on this chair, so they had this one chair
where they would always sit her
and the family would kind of gather round.
And that's when they just started abusing her
and, you know, beating her.
One would hold her while the other one
um, would just physically abuse her.
They had got a plastic bag
and they… I think they put it in her mouth
and held her down on the sofa
and Shafilea struggled until she stopped.
And then the kids were told to go upstairs in their room.
Her dad got rid of the body and her mum after came in the bedroom
and just got into bed with them like everything was normal.
And from that point onwards the kids understood,
"You'll never talk about this."
She asked for her letters back, which I kind of knew she would.
I think she was too afraid that somebody would find out.
And I remember that night I actually ended up making photocopies.
Not to kind of betray her in any way,
but actually just to keep for myself to understand her.
She didn't know I'd photocopied them.
And when we met up, I ended up giving her the original ones back.
And without even thinking, she ripped them up.
It was quite clear when police had spoken to Shahin Munir
that she was a crucial witness for the prosecution.
And she gave evidence.
[Shahin] I always understood the notion of honor within a family.
I always understood the notion of shame within a community.
But I never believed that you could take it so far
that you would kill your own.
[Helen] The judge called this girl as a witness.
She did not agree that she had seen
her parents murder her sister.
She said that the story
that she'd written and shown to Shahin
had been free writing, creative writing,
and she'd just been writing stories.
And there was no truth in it whatsoever.
It wasn't an account of a murder.
[Jasvinder] The other siblings who jumped to the defense of their parents
doesn't surprise me.
Because they've aligned their loyalty to the parents.
It could be that they're fearful for their own lives.
It could be that they have to live in that community
and this is what the community expects of them.
So that decision would not have been taken lightly.
[Helen] She was in an impossible position
because the account that she'd given to Shahin
chimed so closely with the account that her sister had given
that it was impossible that she might by chance
have made up a story.
It just wasn't plausible.
[Jasvinder] They were convicted.
25 years with no parole.
I have to say,
myself and many people in the sector were elated.
[Darshna] It's never gonna bring Shafilea back.
[narrator] It's taken nine years
for Shafilea's sister to find the strength to speak out.
[Jasvinder] This young girl's bravery, I believe was ultimately
what sealed the fate of her parents.
So you're also living with the fact that you've also convicted your parents.
And now having to live a life in protection,
which I believe she'll have to live
in that space for the rest of her life most likely.
Nowhere in Islam, Sikhism, or Hinduism
does it say it is acceptable for you to murder your child.