Love must be sincere.  Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.  Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.  Honor one another above yourselves.
~ Romans 12:9,10

In 1989, Ghulam Sarwar Khan Mohmand, one of the most successful businessmen in Peshawar, capital Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, threw a grand wedding for his daughter Samia.  Over a thousand guests gathered for the celebration, among them three of Pakistan’s provincial chief ministers, one federally appointed governor, and much of the city’s business elite.  The bridegroom, Imran Saleh, was the son of his wife’s sister.  This was a modern, successful Pashtun family: Ghulam Sarwar Mohmand’s wife, Sultana, was a doctor, as was her nephew Imran.  Samia Sarwar studied law later; her sister went on to study medicine.  In 1998, Sarwar himself was to be elected to the first of two terms as president of Peshawar’s Sarhad Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Despite these auspicious beginnings, the marriage was not a success.  Samia Sarwar told her lawyer later that her husband was extremely abusive, and her parents eventually accepted that she should  leave him, allowing her to move back in with them in 1995, when she was pregnant with her second son.  Dr. Saleh called sometime later to say that    he did not want her to come back.  She never saw him again.  But her parents were adamant that a divorce was out of the question.  “You can get anything you want here,” she said they told her, “except a divorce.”  The reason was straight-forward: a divorce would threaten their ghairat, the family’s honor.

Sometime in the years that followed -- with her husband long out of the picture -- Samia Sarwar apparently fell in love with another man.  She was now a law student and so she certainly knew that she had the legal right to petition for divorce from a husband who had first abused and then abandoned her.  In March 1999, while her parents were away in Mecca, making the Hajj, she fled to Lahore.  She moved into Lahore’s only private refuge for battered women, Dastak, and made arrangements with the Pakistani human rights lawyer Hina Jilani to begin divorce proceedings against her husband. 

Over the next few weeks, the Sarwars persuaded their daughter and her lawyer that they were finally willing to agree to the divorce, showing the necessary papers to a prominent opposition politician, who passed on the good news.  And so, on April 6, 1999, she agreed to meet with her mother -- she was not willing, she said, to deal with her father -- at her lawyer’s office.  Her mother was supposed to come alone, but when she arrived she was on the arm of a stocky, bearded man.  According to Hina Jilani, Mrs. Sarwar said this was her driver, whose help she needed because she couldn’t walk on her own.

Once the two of them entered the office over the lawyer’s objection, the driver, Habibur Rehman, pulled out a gun and shot Samia Sarwar in the head.  In the ensuing panic, Rehman was himself shot dead by a security guard, and Samia’s uncle, Yunus Sarwar, who had been waiting outside, kidnapped one of the paralegals in the office, and drove off with her and Samia’s mother in a taxi.  The paralegal said later that Mrs. Sarwar was “cool and collected during the getaway, walking away from the murder of her daughter as though the woman slumped in her own blood was a stranger.”