“Here was someone very ordinary, using tools available to a lot of people to say, ‘I can do what I want, and you can’t stop me, ‘” Zakaria said.
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Waseem Baloch murdered his sister Qandeel Baloch by strangling her at their family home in the city of Multan in Punjab Province in Pakistani for the “kind of pictures she had been posting online”.
In remarks to GeoTV, Baloch’s mother accused Mr Qavi of provoking Azeem into killing her daughter.
While activists in Pakistan have been working for decades to outlaw honor killings, the death of Baloch (her real name was Fauzia Azeem) and several other factors have sped up the process, Yasmeen Hassan, global executive director at Equality Now, an worldwide human rights organization, tells Newsweek.
“This is a new weapon in the hands of Pakistani women”, she said in a telephone interview.
The murder of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch echoed in the UK’s House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon when Prime Minister Theresa May said there was no honour in the so-called honour-based violence.
She found her daughter’s body and found that “her whole face was covered in bruises, her tongue was black, her lips was black”, and started crying, she said.
Baloch began receiving so many death threats that she asked the government for protection, but it ended up being her brother that took her life.
She said this in response to a call from Kashmir-born Conservative MP, Nusrat Ghani, who shed light on Baloch’s murder that occurred on July 15.
There have been many women, unnamed or unknown, before Baloch who have been murdered or attacked, because they have allegedly brought “shame” on the family. While under Pakistani law, the victim’s family can pardon the killer (which often happens if victims and killers are related), the state has barred Baloch’s family from doing so, and her father is pressing forward with murder charges. “She must have called out to us”, her father revealed. Upon being approved, the bill will then be presented for a vote of approval before a joint session of Parliament within a couple weeks, where it is expected to pass.
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Authorities also said they were investigating a high-ranking cleric, Mr Mufti Abdul Qavi, who had appeared with Baloch in selfies taken in a hotel room last month. He also termed her as his son.
