Hina Saleem (21) was reported missing last Saturday by her boyfriend, a 33-year-old Italian carpenter with whom she was living, after she went to pay a visit to her family. Her relations with them had been strained for years. She told the manager of the pizzeria-cum-pub in the middle of the town where she worked as a waitress that she had been summoned home to meet a cousin who was passing through.

Then her mobile phone went dead.

When the Carabinieri broke into the house, they found Saleem's bedroom spattered with blood. In the garden, buried under a metre of soil and with her jeans and blouse soaked in blood, was the body of the missing girl. Her throat had been slit.

Mohammed Saleem, arrested a couple of days after his daughter's body was discovered, allegedly said, "Yes I did it, just me, " before clamming up.

He is in custody but all further attempts to question him have failed.

But reports issuing from Hina Saleem's boyfriend suggest that she had been promised in marriage to a cousin. At the beginning of July she was said to have turned down flat her father's insistent demand that she return with her mother and sisters and others to the city of Gujarat in Pakistan, where she was born, to get married.

The hypothesis of police, reinforced by two empty suitcases in the house, is that her father, a brother-in-law called Mohammed Tariq and another, Mahmood Zahid, tried to persuade her one last time (the female members of the family had already departed).

There are said to be at least 10,000 Pakistanis living in Brescia with regular papers, the largest component of a 120,000-strong immigrant community. A nation of emigrants until a couple of decades ago, Italians have gradually got used to seeing brown and black faces in the streets and hearing strange tongues. But the horrible death of Hina Saleem has aroused all manner of buried doubts and fears.

Only weeks before, Italy's Interior Minister Giuliano Amato had announced a planned liberalisation of the rules for obtaining Italian citizenship, cutting the waiting time from 10 years to five. But Hina's murder, and the public outcry against it, have given him pause.

"The case of the Pakistani woman murdered by her father says a lot about the aims of citizenship, " he commented, "because it is clear that it is not enough to require adhesion to the values of the Italian Constitution. Adhesion to fundamental rights is also necessary, such as the fact that women are to be respected according to rules which I consider universal."