IRVING – The leader of an Irving mosque denounced honor killings Friday, saying they have no place in Islam.

Imam Zia Sheikh's comments came after speculation that two teenage sisters were victims of such a killing. Sarah and Amina Said were found shot to death in a taxi in Irving on New Year's Day.

The girls' father, Egyptian-born cab driver Yaser Said, is wanted in connection with the deaths. He reportedly was troubled by his daughters' relationships with boys.

An honor killing is generally defined as one in which a man kills a female relative who is believed to have shamed their family.

The deaths of the Said sisters are tragic, the imam said Friday, but religion should not be tied to the slayings.

"Murdering one's own children is not permitted at all in Islam," the imam told hundreds of worshippers during a prayer service at the Islamic Center of Irving. "There is no precedent for it. ... That is not the way we deal with children that we are having difficulty with."

Local Muslims fear that talk of honor killings will hamper their efforts to reach out to the community. They said they are trying to use the situation to educate people about Islam.

Muslim experts say that there's no sanction for honor killings from the Quran, the holy book of Islam, or from Islamic law.

"Unfortunately, whenever a person with a Muslim name does something, people immediately say, 'Muslims are doing that, so Islam must permit it,' " said Basheer Ahmed, a Tarrant County psychiatrist and past president of the Islamic Medical Association of North America.

Mr. Said's wife, Patricia, has rejected the notion that Mr. Said's religion or culture had anything to do with the killings. Her son, Islam, 19, said in a recent interview, "Why is it every time an Arab father kills a daughter, it's an honor killing?"

By most accounts, the Said family did not regularly attend religious services or practice daily Muslim prayer.

Family members say Mr. Said was given to fits of violence, threats and gun-waving rants about how Western culture was threatening the chastity of his daughters.

The Said children are dead because of a "sick person," said Mohamoud Egal, president of the Islamic Center of Irving.

"If you kill one soul, it's like you kill the whole humanity; that's what Islam teaches," he said. "How would someone who's right-minded ... kill his own children?"

When Christian parents kill their children, the deaths aren't associated with Christianity, Mr. Egal said.

Still, honor killings do happen, observers say. They are more common in Muslim-majority countries, despite Islamic leaders' condemnation of the practice, according to a United Nations Population Fund report from 2000.

The report found that "perhaps 5,000 women and girls a year" are killed by their own families.

Honor killing "is more cultural, by far, than religious," said Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, a professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta who researched honor killings in Turkey.

Omid Safi, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that honor killings typically take place in societies with a "strong tribal ethic."

"One finds cases of honor killings in Jordan and in the northwest frontier of Pakistan, but ... fewer cases in more urban Muslim contexts," he said.

But Dr. An-Na'im said Islam cannot be dismissed as "irrelevant" to honor killings, given its strong emphasis on sexual purity.

Islamic jurisprudence has been "a little bit slack" when punishing the perpetrators of honor killings, said Robert A. Hunt, director of global theological education at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.

But Dr. Hunt warned against using a single incident, like the killing of the Said sisters, to generalize about Muslims.

He noted that violence by American men against estranged wives or girlfriends is all too common.

"We have our own version of honor killings, and we wouldn't regard those as Christian or American," he said.

Honor killings have been reported in the following countries, according to a United Nations Population Fund report in 2000:

Bangladesh

Brazil

Ecuador

Egypt

India

Israel

Italy

Jordan

Morocco

Pakistan

Sweden

Turkey

Uganda

United Kingdom