Daily Mail: “My mother hired a hitman to kill me: The shocking story of a Muslim woman whose parents disapproved of her Western lifestyle”
— report from Sofia Hayat
— “Sofia Hayat was imprisoned and her mother threatened to kill her because she led a Western lifestyle”
— Sofia Hayat: “The text message forwarded to me from my younger sister Saira was concise and chilling: ‘Mum’s sent a hit man to kill you,’ it read. ‘Be careful.’ As I read those words, my first instinct wasn’t fear or even shock, but simply survival.”
— Sofia Hayat: “I’d become accustomed to behaviour like this from both my parents – behaviour that anyone else would find abhorrent – and I was emotionally numb to their threats. But I also knew that my sister’s warning was deadly serious and my life was in real danger. I’d been in hiding for several weeks when I received the text. I was born in Gravesend in Kent in 1974 and brought up there in a devout Muslim family with three sisters and two brothers.”