Muslim 'kills daughter for refusing head scarf'*

Friend: 'She said she was always scared of her dad'

Toronto Star December 11, 2007
Bob Mitchell
Jim Wilkes
staff reporters

CANADA - A 16-year-old girl is dead and her father has been charged with
murder after an attack in a Mississauga home.

Aqsa Parvez, a student at Applewood Heights Secondary School, had been
on life support in hospital since yesterday morning.

Police went to the family's two-storey home on Longhorn Trail about 8
a.m. yesterday after receiving a 911 call in which a man allegedly
claimed to have killed his daughter.

Paramedics found Aqsa with a faint pulse and rushed her to hospital. She
was later transferred to a Toronto hospital and placed on life support.

Peel police said this morning that she died overnight.

Friends at the victim’s school said she feared her father and had argued
over her desire to shun the hijab, a traditional shoulder-length head
scarf worn by females in devout Muslim families.

Homicide investigators had been standing by, as it soon became clear the
young girl wouldn't survive the attack.

Muhammad Parvez, 57, has been remanded in custody and was to make his
first court appearance today in a Brampton court.

The victim's brother, 26-year-old Waqas Parvez, was also arrested on a
charge of obstructing police.

Neighbours described the family as very private and said several members
from three generations have lived in the two-storey home, near
Hurontario St. and Eglinton Ave., for just over two years.

School chums say Aqsa had been arguing with her family for months over
whether she should wear the hijab.

Pal Ebonie Mitchell, 16, and other friends said Aqsa still wore the
hijab to school last year, but rebelled against dressing in it this fall.

They said she would leave home wearing the traditional garment and loose
clothing, but would often change into tighter garments at school.

She would change back for the bus trip home.

"Sometimes she even changed her whole outfit in the washroom at school,"
Mitchell said.

The teen was known to her classmates and Facebook friends as Axa. She
posted several pictures of herself on the website in colourful clothes
and accessories.

At Aqsa's high school, friends gathered in groups yesterday, struggling
to come to grips with what happened and lamenting how she had quarrelled
with her father to the point that she recently moved out to live with a
friend.

"She said she was always scared of her dad, she was always scared of her
brother ... and she's not scared of nobody," said classmate Ashley
Garbutt, 16.

"She didn't want to go home ... to the point where she actually wanted
to go to shelters."

Friends said the root of her problems was a desire to blend in with
friends at school, to wear the fashionable clothes she liked to buy on
trips to Toronto's garment district, where she went with friends just
last month.

"She liked fashion," said Mitchell. "We went to different stores; she
was shopping; she bought lots of clothes."

"She loved clothes, she loved shopping and she loved taking pictures of
herself," classmate Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson, 16, said outside the
school as friends sobbed at the news.

"She just wanted to show her beauty. She just wanted freedom, freedom
from her parents."

"She just wanted to dress like us, just like a normal person," said
Holmes-Thompson.

"She was a very kind person, she was really nice; everybody loved her."

Friend Shianne Phillips, 16, said she last spoke with Aqsa on Friday.

"She was crying and she was like ‘I'm really scared to go home. I don't
know what I'm going to do.' And that was it," Phillips said.