At her tidy semi-detached home in the North of England, Tahira Naqvi still grieves for her first baby, who she lost as a newlywed bride of 21.

Her son was stillborn midway through her pregnancy. ‘I can never forget him,’ she says with sadness. ‘A hospital pre-birth scan had showed he had a club foot, but doctors didn’t warn me that he might die a few weeks later.’

Tahira is one of hundreds of mothers in Britain touched by tragedy after marrying a cousin. Now 40, she has gone on to have four other children (two boys and two girls) with her husband from Mirpur in the Pakistan-administered region of Kashmir, who is her mother’s brother’s son.

The family’s house overlooks a back garden dotted by children’s bicycles in Bradford, where a vast study has investigated childhood illnesses.

The Born In Bradford Study found that half the city’s babies born each year are to Pakistani-heritage mothers. Like Tahira, two-thirds of these women are married either to first or second cousins, a fact which heightens the risk of their offspring dying or having disabilities.

This multicultural part of Yorkshire is not the only place where baby deaths or illnesses are being blamed on close-kin marriage. Britain’s second city Birmingham recently announced an emergency taskforce to investigate high levels of infant mortality after health and social care officials revealed deaths of newborns there are twice the national average.

While poverty and deprivation play a role in the crisis, a fifth of all infant deaths are a result of genetic problems caused when cousins marry and have children, says a report from Birmingham City Council. Babies of Pakistani and South Asian heritage are disproportionately affected, with one in 188 stillborn compared to one in every 295 white babies.

The disturbing disclosures so alarmed the former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North-West England, Nazir Afzal, that he said there is a case for barring marriage between close relations to end the suffering of ‘profoundly affected children and parents’.

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9645571/More-half-Pakistani-heritage-couples-Britain-cousin-marriages.html

Children of first-cousin marriages have an increased risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders, and this risk is higher in populations that are already highly ethnically similar. Children of more distantly related cousins have less risk of these disorders, though still higher than the average population.~Wikipedia

No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. Leviticus 18:6

It could be due to traditional or religious reasons. I don't know what the Quran says about close-knit marriages, gut I think people from that part of the world see it as normal to marry a close relative.

Italian police hunt Pakistani family who 'strangled 18-year-old girl to death for refusing forced marriage to her cousin

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9675829/Italian-police-hunt-Pakistani-family-suspected-honour-killing.html

It's not just Pakistan. It's pretty much all of south and west Asia.