After six months in terrified hiding, a young Pakistani woman dramatically re-emerged in a Brooklyn courtroom Wednesday — tearfully confronting the father who’d forced her into a loveless arranged marriage and then allegedly gunned down her true love’s father and sister after she ran away.
“He told me he would kill me,” a barely audible Amina Ajmal (inset), 23, told a rapt federal jury of her father, Brooklyn cabby Mohammad Choudhry, on trial for murder conspiracy.
Wearing glasses and a white scarf over a black blouse, the shattered woman broke down in tears as she saw her father for the first time since he’d stood stern-faced before her December forced wedding in a Pakistani village.
Other members of the Choudhry clan glared at the young woman from the front row of the court gallery as she took her oath and began testimony that could put the patriarch away for life.
Her face twisted in apparent agony as a federal prosecutor, Amanda Hector, gently asked Ajmal to identify her father. She fell silent for nearly a minute, sobbing. Even her father buried his head in his hands and began to sob as well.
“He told me, ‘I will kill you if you do anything wrong now,’ ” she said after composing herself, looking down and sniffling to remember their conversation days before the ceremony.
When Ajmal ditched her assigned husband to be with her true love in February, prosecutors charge, Choudhry followed through on his vows of violence and had the lover’s dad and sister gunned down in their village to restore his family’s honor.
Ajmal testified that she lived in Pakistan before moving to Flatbush with her father and four siblings in 1999 when she was 9. Her mother died when she was only 4.
Speaking in a dazed monotone, Ajmal told the court she was very close to her father in those early years and that he even allowed her to adopt some of the customs of her new home.
“He wanted me to be educated,” she said, noting her dad drove his taxi seven days a week to provide for the family. “I had cellphones and Facebook. We were allowed to watch TV.”
She went to school at P.S. 192 and graduated from Bishop Kearney HS in Bensonhurst before enrolling at Brooklyn College. Meanwhile, Choudhry drove his taxi seven days a week, she said, to provide for the family.
Ajmal testified that she first heard whispers that she would be married off to her cousin in Pakistan at the age of 10. Her father’s ironclad plan was to make her the wife of Abrar Ahmed Babar so he could attain his citizenship and move to America.
But when she revealed that she wanted to marry another man from the same village, Shujat Abbas, the, her father’s reaction was ferocious, she said. Her father and uncle disapproved of his family and told her to abandon the idea. Her testimony continues Thursday.
Ajmal said her father slowly tired of her resistance and took her to Pakistan for a wedding in 2009. Thinking she would be heading back to America in a few weeks, Choudhry told her she would be staying there to undo her insolence.
“He told me I was too Americanized,” she told the court. “And I need to learn my culture.”
When she was caught contacting Abbas with a forbidden cell phone, her uncle threatened to kill her, she told the court. “He told me ‘your father gave me permission to kill you if you don’t marry Babar,” she said.
Ajmal finally succumbed to the wedding last December and prosecutors presented video of her looking miserable next to Babar and her stern-faced father at the ceremony. After finally escaping Pakistan and going into hiding, prosecutors said Ajmal’s father snapped and had Abbas’s relatives mowed down in February.