``They (authorities) apparently believe an innocent woman's brutal murder is not a heinous crime,'' wrote I A Rehman, director of the independent human rights commission of Pakistan, in the widely-read `Newsline' magazine.

Samia Sarwar who had come to Lahore from her parent's home in Peshawar was shot dead in her lawyer's Office on April 6 by a man accompanying her mother who had sought the appointment with her daughter.

While the assassin was killed minutes later by a policeman on duty at the office, Sarwar's mother and uncle who was armed with a pistol took a woman on the staff hostage and made their escape.

The brazen killing sparked outrage in Pakistan and abroad, also because Sarwar's family though from feudal Peshawar was no ordinary family. In a society where women are veiled and never seen, her motheris a doctor and her father a rich businessman.

The parents had taken their daughter back after she left her abusive husband - her mother's nephew - four years ago and supported her and her two children. She had been permitted to study law while her younger sister was a qualified doctor.

Yet they took her life for daring to seek dissolution of a marriage gone sour - `Karo Kari' or honour killing of women and girls by male family members is widely prevalent in Pakistan.

``It's all about control,'' says Neelam Hussain of Simorgarh, a women's research and publication centre in Lahore, capital of Pakistan's richest province and the hometown of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

``It's fear of loss of control,'' she adds.

According to Cassandra Balchin, a journalist working at Shirkat Gah, a women's resource centre with offices in Karachi and Lahore, ``There is a presumption that disobedience will lead to loss of control not just of women, but property ... a loss of social control.''

In this patriarchalsociety women always belong to men: They are either wives or daughters in a system that draws its legitimacy from a very narrow interpretation of Islam and tradition. Nighat said Khan, of the applied socio-economic research institute, says that ``women are the symbols of the nation state, the image the state projects of itself: In his very first speech general Zia talked about `chaddar' (veil) and `charvedar'.''

Why has women's freedom become such a major issue?

There are many reasons cited ranging from increased media attention to choices that did not previously exist for women, to the support and the space created by dozens of social and human rights organisations all over the country.

Even if women are only asking for small freedoms, they are increasingly asserting themselves, agree social activists. Some 2,000 women participated in a rally here last December on world rights day - the biggest march by women in Pakistan - demanding the government safeguard their fundamental rights.

``Women are nolonger willing to be beaten, forcibly married etc,'' says Farida Shaheed, an activist.