Oh god what an unbearable story. Be warned: this is an unbearable story.
A young woman has spoken of her “living hell” as her abusive ex-husband was jailed for life with a minimum of 28 years for shooting her mother as an act of revenge.
Tariq Rana, 31, travelled from his home in Wolverhampton to Pakistan intent on tracking down relatives of his 28-year-old wife Ayesha Riaz, who split up with him a year after their arranged marriage.
So for that he killed her mother. For a wound to his precious ego, he killed the mother of the woman who didn’t like being married to him. I like my ego as much as the next person, but I don’t kill people to avenge slights to it.
He shot his mother-in-law, Ghulam Asia, at her house in Lahore with an unnamed accomplice, dressed as a delivery man.
The pair rang the doorbell and when Asia, 49, went to the gate to sign for the delivery, Rana shot her twice at short range.
Fifteen minutes later, he texted his sister in the UK, saying: “Yeah I shot the bitch fully I think she expired.”
He then made a series of angry and aggressive telephone calls to Riaz’s brothers, threatening to kill them all unless she came back to him.
I begin to get some idea of why she left him.
I wonder whose idea it was to arrange that marriage, and whose idea it was to choose him as the husband.
On Friday, the victim’s family sat in the Old Bailey behind a screen obscured from the dock, as Riaz’s emotional victim impact statement was read out on her behalf.
In it, she said: “Words cannot begin to describe the way it feels knowing my mother has been killed by my ex-husband. Not a day passes where I do not regret marrying him and becoming a victim of his physical abuse.”
She said that the family lived in fear that he would attempt to kill us all to the point where they were even too scared to open the door.
She told how her sisters in Pakistan had been devastated by the “ghastly crime” and the family home had been sold because they could not bear to stay.
She said: “They watched their mother covered in blood and dying in front of their eyes on the doorstep of their home. It was not her time to go. This incident has become a nightmare.”
They were left in a “living hell”, she added: “Just to satisfy his own dirty ego, Tariq Rana has killed the mother of six children. Now we will spend the rest of our lives feeling afraid and vulnerable.”
It’s an unbearable story.
> I like my ego as much as the next person, but I don’t kill people to avenge slights to it.
That’s because you lack the ‘special’ ineffable essence of spiritual wonderfulness that Karen Armstrong, and all the other soft-soap apologists think everyone should have.
I’m amazed that he thought she would go back to him after he killed her mother. How did he see that playing out:
“I’m leaving you.”
“I’ve killed your mother and will kill all your family if you don’t come back.”
“Oh. Well in that case, I guess we can make this marriage work.”
He didn’t think killing someone made him an outlaw? No. I suppose he didn’t.
Considering he then publicized the fact to people who would be motivated to report it, clearly he didn’t.
If everyone involved lived in Pakistan, would we even have heard about this?