The parents of a teenager murdered her because she failed to conform to their wishes for an arranged marriage and she allegedly “brought shame” on the family, a court has heard.

Shafilea Ahmed, who was 17 when she died in September 2003, was described as a westernised British girl of Pakistani origin at the start of her parents’ murder trial at Chester crown court. Her parents, Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, a taxi driver, from Warrington, Cheshire, and his wife, Farzana, 49, a housewife, are accused of murder.

Shafilea’s badly decomposed remains were discovered by workmen in Sedgwick, Cumbria, five months after she disappeared in February 2004, the jury was told.

Prosecutor Andrew Edis QC told the jury on Monday morning that her parents had standards that she was “reluctant to follow”. In particular, like most 16- or 17-year-old girls, she wanted boyfriends, Edis said, which caused intense pressure on the family. Her parents controlled her so she didn’t have freedom of movement, the court heard. She ran away from home in 2002 and early 2003, but always returned.

In the year before she died, the prosecution said, her parents “embarked on a campaign of domestic violence and abuse directed at her and designed to force her to conform so that she behaved in a way that was expected”.

“The defendants had spent the best part of 12 months trying to crush her will, realised they were not going to succeed and finally killed her because she had dishonoured the family and brought shame on them.”

He said that when she went missing on 11 September she wasn’t reported missing until a week later, “not by a member of her family”, Edis said, “but by a teacher”.

Edis said the prosecution alleges she was murdered by her parents at the family home on the night of 11-12 September 2003.

He told the court that Shafilea’s younger sister, Alesha, had witnessed the murder of her sister by her parents “acting together”, and later told police what she saw after she was arrested in 2010 for her part in a robbery at the family home.

It was the final piece of the jigsaw for the police investigation, the prosecution said, as “until that moment [it] had no direct evidence of murder”.

Edis said it was an extraordinary thing to accuse your parents of murder, to say that you were there and watched your parents murder your sister. He said for the last “almost nine years, Alesha had lived under the most extraordinary of circumstances”.

After telling her friends in 2003 what had happened, Alesha soon retracted her comments and returned to the family unit, where she was brought back into “silence and denial”. It must have been a great strain because of her divided loyalties, the court heard.

The court heard that Shafilea was “recaptured or abducted” by her father outside her school in February 2003 after she had run away from home.

Edis said arranged marriages were perfectly acceptable in many communities, but said forced marriage was a completely different thing. He said the two defendants wanted an arranged marriage for their daughter but “in the end it was going to require compulsion because she didn’t want to do it”.

Shafilea, he said, was taken to Pakistan later in February 2003 and was “appalled” by the prospect of an arranged marriage to a man in rural Pakistan. She swallowed bleach at her grandparents’ house in Pakistan as an act of self-harm or out of desperation. When she returned to the UK, she was taken to hospital as an emergency case and needed regular treatment on a stricture of her oesophagus.

He said no one else had caused Shafilea distress “apart from her parents”.

The prosecution alleges that her parents also withdrew money from her bank account that she’d saved from a part-time job.

The Ahmeds deny murder and the trial continues.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/may/21/shafilea-ahmed-murdered-parents-court