Maddening
There's more, including, "...Fatah said 'a victim of an honour killing is always left in an unmarked grave.'" Be sure to click through and give it a read. People need to know that this is happening. There's been stories out of BC. Even one from Quebec in 2007 if I am remembering correctly.Number 774. One year to the day Aqsa Parvez was stolen from this world -- allegedly by two members of her family -- that is all there is at her gravesite to show she even existed.
Section 17, plot number 774, in the Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, to be precise. No name, no date of birth, no date of death. No nothing.
But resting here is a girl who dared to be Canadian.
She was strangled Dec. 10, 2007 inside her family's Longhorn Trail home.
Her father and brother will be in court next week to answer to charges of first-degree murder.
At Parvez' gravesite, one would never know the 16-year-old Grade 11 Applewood Heights Secondary School student was buried here. You would never know anybody was buried here.
"If not for a couple of her girlfriends, who put some flowers there, there would be nothing," said a disgusted Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and author of Chasing a Mirage, The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. "It's disgraceful."
"That girl was not a number," adds Imam Syed Soharwardy, of the Al-Mamadinah Islamic Centre in Calgary and national president of Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. "She had a name and a life. It makes me sick."
Her friends describe Pakistan-born Aqsa as a happy teen who loved photography and loved to dance. Who knows where she would be if she had not, one year ago this morning, gone back to the family home from which she was estranged?
Her friends expected her at school. Instead, a call was made to police saying she had been killed.
With the preliminary hearing for her father Muhammad Parvez, 58, and brother Waqas, 27, to begin Dec. 17, evidence is expected to show family disagreements over cultural issues, including the wearing of the traditional hijab.
"A planned and deliberate act" is how Peel Regional Police's head of homicide, Insp. Norm English, was last year describing this murder. Recently, he refused an interview request saying "two people are charged with first-degree murder and we have not said very much because they are entitled to their day in court where we will present a very strong case."
It will be a packed courtroom and time will tell how this will turn out legally.
It's not known whether Aqsa's killing was an honour killing. The honour killing tag is given to those victims who were killed as an illustration to peers that their shamed family has washed their hands of the embarrassment to their radical form of Islam with their disgraced family member's blood. It's a barbaric act, sometimes with agreement of other family members, that sadly occurs in some Muslim countries.
