They arrested the mother and are searching for her son, who allegedly assisted in the killing, according to local reports.

AD

A local police official told AP that Parveen had confessed and even claimed, “I don’t have any regrets.”

Zeenat's husband, Hassan Khan, told reporters that the pair had been in love since they met in school but that his marriage proposals had been rebuffed by her family. He showed a cellphone photo of his slain bride:

AP has more details:

AD

Khan, the husband of the woman killed in Lahore, said her mother and uncle had visited her three days ago to try to persuade her to return home and have a marriage ceremony with the family, so that she wouldn’t be branded as someone who had eloped. He recalled his wife telling him: “Don’t let me go, they will kill me.”

The incident follows a similar episode last week in which a schoolteacher was set on fire for allegedly refusing to marry a man twice her age; the suspected culprit was the man's father.

Honor killings are depressingly prevalent in Pakistan. A report by an independent commission in the country, published in April, found that nearly 1,100 women believed to have brought disrepute to their families were killed by relatives in 2015 — a rise in such violence from previous years.

AD

A documentary by Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on a hideous honor-killing attempt won an Oscar this year. Yet, despite the growing domestic — let alone worldwide — recognition of the evil of this custom, the practice persists in rural and impoverished parts of Pakistan.

"We need to make examples of people," Obaid-Chinoy told WorldViews a day after winning the Oscar. "Some people still don't think that killing a woman in the name of honor is actually a crime."