For nearly a decade, they kept up the sham that they were grieving parents whose beautiful daughter had been kidnapped

In reality, Farzana and Iftikhar Ahmed were Muslim killers who murdered 17-year-old Shafilea because she simply wouldn't conform to the values of rural Pakistan – and then terrorized the rest of their family into a sickening nine-year cover-up. As the pair were jailed for life, social services were accused of missing several key warning signs in the run-up to Shafilea's death. Indeed, the killers were exposed only after Shafilea's younger sister plucked up the courage to tell how she and her siblings watched them suffocate her in 2003. Mr Justice Roderick Evans said that Westernized Shafilea simply wanted a normal life but found herself squeezed between two cultures. He then made a thunderous attack on the morals of the Muslim parents standing in front of him at Chester Crown Court. "What was it that brought you two, her parents, the people who had given her life, to the point of killing her?" he asked them. "You chose to bring up your family in Warrington but your social and cultural attitudes were those of rural Pakistan. Shafilea was a determined, able and ambitious girl who wanted to live a life which was normal in the country in which you had chosen to live and bring up your children. However, you could not tolerate the life that Shafilea wanted to live. You wanted your family to live in Pakistan in Warrington." He ordered both Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, and his 49-year-old wife to serve a minimum of 25 years in prison.