A mother and her son were jailed for life yesterday for murdering the teenage daughter they believed had insulted the honour of their family with her adulterous pregnancy.
Rukhsana Naz, 19, had hoped to divorce her husband, whom she had only seen twice since her arranged marriage at the age of 15, and to marry her lover.
But she was strangled by her mother and brother after she refused to have an abortion.
Shakeela Naz fainted after a jury at Nottingham crown court found her and her eldest son Shazad guilty of murder.
The 45-year-old widow held the woman's feet while her 22-year-old son strangled her with a piece of plastic flex at her home in Normanton, Derby, last year, the court heard. The teenager was seven months pregnant.
A second son, Iftikhar, 18, who described watching helplessly as the victim died, was cleared of any involvement.
Sentencing the couple, Mr Justice Tucker said: 'It was a particularly horrific offence, involving as it did the death of a young pregnant woman, who was already a mother of two children, at the hands of her own family you, Shakeela being her mother, and Shazad, being her brother. In my view this was a planned murder.'
After the case, the teenager's 19-year-old sister Safina, who acted as a go-between for her and the boyfriend she had secretly dated since the age of 12, said: 'It is hard to believe that members of my own family, who I have always loved dearly, should have been involved in my sister's death.' She said she was 'very glad that those responsible for her death had been brought to justice.'
Rukhsana's lover, Imran Najib, aged 21, who broke down as the verdicts were given, said: 'I feel sorry for Shakeela, because, no matter what came out in court, I cannot believe any mother could do that to her own daughter. But Shazad deserved life.'
During the two-and-a-half week trial, the court heard how Mrs Naz was incensed on discovering her daughter was expecting an illegitimate child, and believed she was guilty of a 'great insult' to the honour of her family.
While Rukhsana harboured hopes of gaining a divorce from her husband who lived in Pakistan, and who she had only seen twice since her arranged marriage at the age of 15 and marrying Imran, her family could not countenance this for two reasons: he was already married, and he was socially inferior to her.
The seamstress, whose social worker husband, Mohammed, had been a leading figure in Birmingham's Muslim community, tried to force her daughter to have an abortion, kicked her in the stomach, and told her to take paracetamol to induce a miscarriage.
But Rukhsana, who already had two children, now aged 18 months and three, by her 19-year-old husband, refused. There was only one outcome. 'We did not want to kill her,' her mother told police. 'But it was written in her fate.'
Three weeks later, having been told by her doctor it was too late for her daughter to have an abortion, the mother and Shazad, who had been summoned from his work in London, murdered Rukhsana. Their preparations were thorough: boots, spades, torches and acid which they claimed were needed for gardening were bought, and their victim was made to clean out a large trunk, to serve as a coffin, and to sign a will naming them as her children's guardians. On the evening of Thursday March 26 last year, having left Safina to prepare the weekly prayer supper, the mother and her two sons set out from their terraced home in Clarence Street, Derby, to the home the two sisters shared further down the road.
There, Shazad, who had been told to 'talk sense' into his sister, confronted her about the pregnancy, and, while his mother held her feet, grabbed a piece of plastic flex and pulled it tightly around her neck for three or four minutes.
Iftikhar, who had been upstairs, later told officers of coming down to discover his brother standing over his sister's body. 'I could see him gritting his teeth, and there was no struggle from her,' he said. 'He had tears running down his face, and so did my mother. She was holding Rukhsana's legs and crying. I froze by the door. My mother turned to me and said: 'Be strong, son.'
'I then saw Shazad lift up Rukhsana's head. He kissed her forehead and said: 'I'm sorry.' He then put his hand on her stomach and said, 'It's not the kid's fault, he's innocent'.'
The older brother then threatened Iftikhar, a part-time waiter, with a flick knife, telling him, 'I've killed once. I don't mind killing another', and forced him to help to dispose of the body.
Bundling the body into a shroud their mother had made, and then into the trunk, the brothers then placed it in the boot of Iftikhar's Vauxhall Cavalier and drove 100 miles to Denby Dale, west Yorkshire, where they decided against a proper Muslim burial for fear someone would hear them digging.
They then drove down the M1 to Derby, where they scattered the remains of the trunk on wasteland, threw her shoes in a rubbish bin, and went to a snooker club to allay suspicions.
Five days later, a farmer stumbled across the body. Police identified her with the help of Imran's pager number scrawled on the back of her hand the means by which she passed on love messages and arranged trysts with him.
After the verdict, the factory worker, who also had an arranged marriage, said: 'We were in love and she wanted to live with me. She was expecting my baby, and I was quite happy with that. We wanted to go away together, but we knew our relationship would be frowned upon in our community. We knew it could cause trouble.'