Austin Texas, Oct.15 ANI: The Federal Bureau of
Investigation FBI has finally admitted after almost a year that the murder of two
teenage girls by their father is a case of "honor killing."Sarah Said, 17, and her sister Amina, 18, were killed on New Year's Day, and were found in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas.But for nine months, the FBI deflected
questions about whether their father - the prime suspect and the subject of a nationwide manhunt - may have targeted them because of a perceived slight upon his honor.According to Fox
News, the girls' great-aunt, Gail Gartrell, says the girls' Egyptian-born father killed them both because he felt they disgraced the
family by
dating non-
Muslims and
acting too Western, and she called the girls' murders an honor killing from the start.But some
Muslims say that calling the case an honor killing goes too far."As far as we're concerned, until the motive is proven in a
court of
law, this is just a homicide," Mustafaa Carroll, the executive director of the Council of American-Islamic
Relations in Dallas, told FOXNews.com.He said he worries that terms like "honor killing" may stigmatize the Islamic
community. "We
Muslims don't have the
market on jealous husbands ... or domestic violence," Carroll said.The United Nations estimates that 5,000
women are killed worldwide every year in honor killings - mostly in the
Middle East, where many
countries still have
laws that protect
men who murder female relatives they believe have engaged in inappropriate
activity. A U.N.
report includes chilling examples of such cases.Their
friends and
classmates knew many of the threats against Sarah and Amina. High
school friends told the Dallas Morning
News that the
girls sometimes came in with welts and bruises, which they confided were inflicted by their father. After Yaser Said threatened to kill one daughter in December 2007 - documented in text messages Sarah Said sent to a
friend - the
girls and their
mother, Patricia, fled from their
home in Lewisville, Texas, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. But the
mother soon had a change of
heart and went back, leading to the tragedy on January 1. Some, including Gartrell, believe the
mother may even have been complicit in the murders.An FBI spokesman played down the significance of the
listing, saying that the change on the
wanted listing was simply due to more
information coming out about the case since it was first listed and that it shouldn't matter what the case is called. ANI