During the final, terrifying seconds of his life Mian Shahid Mehmood would have needed no one to tell him that he was a long way from home.

The 29-year-old Pakistani man had hoped to build an exciting new life when he moved to Britain in 2006 to join the woman he had married secretly after they met and fell in love.

Twelve months later he was driven to a narrow and isolated moorland lane in the hills above Halifax, West Yorkshire. As Mr Mehmood knelt in the darkness, the lights of the textile town sparkling in the valley below, he was shot twice in the back and then left to die.

His killers were three thugs, hired for murder by a man for whom Mr Mehmood's marriage represented an affront to family dignity: his wife's elder brother, Arza Khan.

At Leeds Crown Court yesterday all four were found guilty of murder after a lengthy trial that focused on Mr Mehmood's doomed marriage to Yasmin Bibi Rakha.

The jury listened to a tale of secrets, fear and misery, born of a bullying, patriarchal culture that found no room - even in Britain - for a woman to have a role in determining her own destiny.

One of six children born to Pakistani Muslim parents in Halifax, Yasmin was removed from primary school at the age of 9 and taken to live with her uncle in Pakistan. For the next three years, she received an education only in housework and when she was finally allowed to return to Britain, aged 15, she had already been promised in marriage to her first cousin, her uncle's son.

Back in Yorkshire she tried to gain some control of her life, studying for A levels at a local college and gaining work as a receptionist. The male members of her violent, controlling family disapproved.

In 2002, aged 19, she was taken to Pakistan by her two brothers, one elder, one younger, for a supposedly short holiday that turned into a six-month stay. Yasmin was told by her siblings that she would be allowed to go home “when you start behaving yourself”. Instead, she committed the worst sin in the book by falling in love.

Attending Khan's arranged marriage to a woman called Jaweria Tariq, Yasmin met and fell for the bride's brother, Mr Mehmood. The feeling was mutual.

Khan was outraged by the relationship. He threatened to kill her new boyfriend - his own brother-in-law - and Yasmin soon bore the bruises of his ire.

It was not that Mr Mehmood was unsuitable. The young political science graduate came from an affluent and respected family in Pakistan, where his father was a prominent businessman and Punjabi politician.

Yasmin's crime lay in defying the family code. She had been promised by her father to her first cousin. Any threat to the fulfilment of that contract risked a stain on the family's honour.

Feeling threatened, the young couple decided that Yasmin must leave Pakistan immediately. Mr Mehmood bought her a plane ticket, and, while her uncle was out, she dashed to Lahore airport, where Mr Mehmood put an engagement ring on her finger before Yasmin flew back to Britain alone.

She tried next to break free of her family chains, moving to Edinburgh and later Cardiff, but her brothers tracked her down. A large group of men arrived one day and took her back to Halifax.

Still determined to be with Mr Mehmood, in October 2004 Yasmin flew to Pakistan. With his family's blessing, they were secretly married and for a while lived under armed guard in Gujarat, India.

Home was Britain, however, and Yasmin wanted to return. The couple took a huge - and ultimately fatal - risk when her husband agreed to follow her.

Yasmin came back alone initially and found a job at a nursing home. She tried to conceal the marriage, but Khan discovered the truth and threatened to pay someone to kill her and Mr Mehmood.

Yasmin's husband understandably steered clear of Halifax when he first arrived in Britain in February 2006, staying at first with relatives in Oldham, but Yasmin had other plans.

Desperate to spend more time with her husband, she found a rented terraced house half a mile from her family home and in the autumn he moved in. Her family knew nothing about it.

Close neighbours soon became suspicious of the new arrival, whose lifestyle seemed almost that of a fugitive. One told The Times that he rarely left the house except late at night and refused to open his door to any visitors bar one, a young Asian woman who came regularly to drop off bowls of food.

“She'd knock on the door and he'd open it a fraction and she'd sneak in. It was totally bizarre, like he was hiding in the house. He always looked so scared,” she said.

The regular visitor was Yasmin, who was still living with her family while covertly trying to spend as much time as possible with her husband. On the rare occasions they ventured out together in her car, Mr Mehmood would lie down so that no one could see him.

It was inevitable that they would be found out sooner or later. On February 11 last year there was no response to Yasmin's knock on the door.

Unaware that her husband was lying dead at the side of a moorland road, she left food on the doorstep and went home to find that her father, Allah Rakha, a 58-year-old nightshift worker in a local factory, was in a jovial mood. The jury was told that she heard him singing: “Today, God has listened. What I wanted has happened today. God has helped me.”

Khan, 28, who ran a restaurant in Halifax, had hired two pub doormen, Sam Lee, 30, and Naveed Mahmood, 23, and a former security worker, John Reeves, 55, to execute his wrath. The jury heard that “the job” probably cost between £5,000 and £8,000.

The three contract killers drove north in a car, which was later found burnt out, took the terrified Mr Mehmood from his home, drove him to the moors and shot him dead.

His widow was not in court to hear the verdicts. She was to have been the prosecution's star witness, but in the dock she wept as she said that she no longer wanted to testify against her brother. “I have lost my whole family, not just my husband. I just don't want to give evidence,” she told the court.

The prosecution was given permission to treat her as a hostile witness and Yasmin admitted to the court that she had been “really scared” for her husband's safety.

She insisted that she wanted justice for Mr Mehmood: “I did not want him to die. I wanted him to be with me and lead a happy life with him and my dream would have come true. Who am I going to tell the things in my heart that I am going through?”

A family liaison officer, PC John Hallam, told the court that Yasmin had come under enormous pressure from other members of the family to retract the statement she made to police after the murder. Her father had asked her to withdraw the statement, he said, and her mother had told her she was “being evil”. Members of the wider Muslim community in Halifax had also criticised her.

After a brief period in a refuge after the murder, 25-year-old Yasmin is back living at home with her family. Detective Superintendent Tim Forber, who led the murder inquiry, said that he remained concerned for her safety.

“I don't like the phrase ‘honour killings'. This was all about control. It is one of the most pernicious forms of domestic violence,” he said.

Jasvinder Sanghera, who runs the Karma Nirvana project for victims of honour-based violence, said that thousands of young girls were forced to marry against their will in Britain every year. “They are the victims of families operating within an honour-code framework which is in direct conflict with everything this country is supposed to stand for in terms of individual liberty,” she said.

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