‘I was to marry some guy in the village’

HER father said it would be a two-week holiday to learn about her Pakistani heritage.

But the British woman soon found herself captive in a remote tribal village for over a year and promised in marriage to a first cousin she’d never met.

With the British High Commission’s help this month, the woman escaped Pakistan shortly before her planned wedding, avoiding the kind of forced marriage that scores of foreign women annually are forced to make in this deeply conservative Islamic country.

“My dad made me believe it was just a holiday,” said the 20-year-old woman, who declined to reveal her actual name and asked to go by Shazia for her own personal protection.

“But the weeks turned into months and months.”

More than 100 British nationals of Pakistani descent — 20% of them males as young as 14 — have been rescued in each of the past two years after being forced into marriages in Pakistan.

But this could be just the tip of the iceberg, officials say.

Sumaira Malik, Pakistani minister for women’s affairs described forced marriages as “despicable” and contrary to Pakistan and Islamic law. She said the government is committed to improving educational standards and women’s freedoms in an attempt to reform society.

An example she cites is the proposed Protection of Women’s Rights Bill, which aims to change a controversial Islamic rape law — known as the Hudood Ordinance — that needs the testimony of four witnesses to prosecute a rape case.

After a short time Shazia’s father returned to Britain but ordered her to remain.

“I didn’t know what was going on. But he told all his relatives that the plan was for me to marry some guy in the village,” Shazia said.

Then for more than a year, Shazia was made to live as a rural Pakistani villager in the North West Frontier Province — wearing local clothes, cooking food, cleaning the house, fetching water from a nearby well and milking cows.

About a year later, Shazia’s 18-year-old sister was also forced to join her sibling.

But she had heard that British authorities had a dedicated team in Pakistan to help British nationals forced to marry there. Once in Pakistan, she got word to British High Commission officials of her and her sister’s whereabouts.

Both have since returned to Britain and vowed to not contact their father.