Pakistani Immigrant In Italy Killed For Opposing Daughter's Arranged Marriage

It doesn't take much to set off certain men, and when your culture and religion pretty much stipulate that you have the right to discipline the female members of your family, anger plus that 'right' often lead to tragedy. That's why honor killings happen, why scorned lovers try harm the women who scorn them by burning them or throwing acid on their faces or cutting off ears and noses. That takes a lot of unbridled anger to harm another, but it happens all the time in both countries where it originates and by immigrants to other countries, where those old cultural and religious habits die hard.

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And many of the reasons for killing someone are downright ridiculous. Take 20-year-old Nosheen Butt's mother,Beghm Shnez. A Pakistani woman living in Novi, Italy with her 53-year-old husband Ahmad Khan Butt, her daughter, 19-year-old son, Umair and three other kids. The family had been living in Italy for almost ten years and Ahmad was a construction worker and owned a local mosque. Beghm lost her life after she was beaten to death with a brick by her husband because she happened to oppose the arranged marriage of Nosheen. But Beghm wasn't the only victim here, while dad was beating mom, the brother got into the act by beating Nosheen with a stick. He broke her arm and cracked her skull, and the young woman had to be hospitalized for her injuries.

The mother was, in essence, protecting her daughter and for that she lost her life.

"The victim did not want her daughter to have an unhappy relationship like the one that had been forced on her," said deputy Modena prosecutor Lucia Musti, who is in charge of the investigation.

"The mother and the daughter were on the same side and this could be called a 'cultural' homicide because in addition to domestic violence there is the issue of the traditions that may have motivated the crime," Ms Musti said.

Now the three younger children have no mother and no father and have been placed into the custody of Italian social services.

This isn't the first similar occurrence and it has the Italians hopping mad.

The Italian political class reacted with indignation at the incident which was highly similar to the cases of a girl of Pakistani origin in 2006 and a Moroccan girl in 2009 who wanted to lead Western lives with Italian boyfriends.

Livia Turco, a senior politician in the Democrats of the Left main opposition party, condemned "arranged marriages and violence against women" on the pretext of "ethnic traditions" that she blasted as "medieval practices".

Politician Isabella Bertolini in Italy's main conservative party said that the deceased woman, Beghm Shnez, was a "martyr for freedom, a victim of obscurantism and Islamic fundamentalism".

One of the major problems is a failure of immigrant families to adapt to their new homelands, and even fellow Muslims seem to feel the same way about the lack of integration.

Conservative lawmaker Souad Sbai of Moroccan origin said that such "intolerable barbarism" was the "result of failed integration" of the father and brother into Italian society.

Old habits die hard, but there are some things that need to be addressed when immigrants move to Western countries. The religious, cultural community needs to reach out to these people to help them. After ten years in a country one would assume that they would have assimilated, but obviously not. He might have gotten off lightly in Pakistan for killing his wife, but I don't think that will happen in Italy.