Shot for love: Femicides continue in Pakistan despite tougher laws

Jabba, Pakistan - When Rabia Shah saw a familiar face behind a gun trained to her head, she begged her uncle not to fire. “Uncle, Please don’t kill me,” the young woman screamed.

But outrage and a desire for revenge surged through the man and he did not hesitate. He fired once, twice, a third time. Shah fell dead in a pool of blood.

The man and his four accomplices then turned on Shah’s 16-month-old daughter sitting nearby in a pram. Without a moment of empathy, they shot her dead as well.

“I watched all this helplessly,” says Nasreen Bibi, Shah’s mother-in-law, who was at home when the men barged into the family’s home in the mountainous town of Jabba in northern Pakistan.

The killers were Shah’s uncles and cousins. Their anger was triggered by her decision to marry a man she chose, without the consent of her family. 

It is a familiar story in the conservative Islamic society of Pakistan.

Shah married Umar Khan five years ago. The couple then went into hiding in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, fearing her family might kill both of them.

Khan went to Saudi Arabia for a better job and Shah decided to return to the village, assuming that time might have cooled her family’s anger. “She was wrong,” Bibi says, trying to hold back tears.

The double murder shattered the Khan family.

Khizar Khan, the family’s younger son, says he has been trying to overcome his grief for a year, but it keeps coming returning, particularly when he sees the grave of the young child behind their home.

“I go to the grave every morning and pray that those who did this to our family will be punished the same way,” the young Khan says, standing at the baby’s grave. 

But it is unclear whether the suspects will be punished, as more than a year has passed since they were murdered in April 2025.

“I am still trying to get justice for my kids from police stations to courtrooms, but don’t have any assurance,” says Munawar Khan, the head of the family who is pursuing the case in court.

Five people were arrested and confessed to having killed Shah and her baby, But three of them left prison on bail, says Khan.

The misogynist killing of women has long been excused by reference to what relatives claim is the “family honor.” Such murders are not rare in Pakistan and have become widespread in recent years.

At least 470 women were killed by their close relatives – father, brothers, sons - in 2025 alone, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

The number is higher than the 405 cases the year before, the HRCP report says. The rise comes despite tougher laws to deal with the crime that often draw national and, in some cases, global outrage. 

More than a third of the victims come from the central province of Punjab, Pakistan’s agricultural heartland where the conservative Islamic society is tightly held together by tribal and religious bonds.

The latest report says another 1,332 murders were caused by domestic violence involving women last year.

“It’s an endemic problem in Pakistan. And the most worrying part is that the trend is rising,” says Farzana Bari, one of country’s top women’s rights activists.

Fathers, brothers and sons are the perpetrators of the murders in most cases, on the pretext of saving what they describe as the family’s honor, says Rizwan Khan, a lawyer based in the capital Islamabad.

The killer in most cases gets away without punishment due to a controversial Islamic clause in laws that lets relatives of the victim pardon the perpetrator, human rights organization Amnesty International says.

Pakistan approved a new law in 2016 to partially drop the controversial clause, but that has not proved sufficient to halt the killings, says HRCP.

That change of law came in response to anger that swept through the country after the murder of a social media star. Qandeel Baloch was killed by her brother on July 15, 2016, for uploading videos he saw as explicit.

The new law left it up to the courts to decide whether to accept an agreement between the complainant and killer.

Legal practitioners say this was not enough to solve the problem.

“This is still a loophole, especially when we are operating in a corrupt and easy to manipulate criminal justice system,” lawyer Khan says. “Unless the clause of forgiveness is totally removed, murderers can skip punishment.”

Activists agree. “Law can act as a framework, but the implementation gap and deep-seated cultural mindsets are where justice consistently breaks down,” says Samar Minallah, Pakistan’s leading anthropologist.

“When people see perpetrators walk free or witness traditional compromises, it shatters public trust in the state’s legal system.”Minallah suggests dropping the word “honor” when referring to such murders, to change the narrative around the crime.

“Changing narrative is the need of the hour. The word ‘honor’ itself must be aggressively stripped away from these crimes in public discourse, media and police documentation. It is not an issue of honor. It is premeditated, cold-blooded murder driven by control and property mindsets,” Minallah says.

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This story was originally published July 18, 2026 at 8:09 AM.