Islam and Human Rights
'Honour' killing in Pakistan: Buried truth?
An editorial in The News, Islamabad
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
This is a distinct diversion from accounts from NGOs that have investigated the happening. People in Usta Muhammad, the principal town of Jaffarabad, had reported a vehicle with government number plates had been used to whisk away the three teenage girls – and possibly another woman accompanying them – from a hotel. They speak of a 'tribal influential' being involved. It is thought the young women, all of them educated, who had chosen to exercise their lawful right to make their own choice in marriage, had come to the town to enter into court marriages with the men of their choosing. Many details, lost amidst various cover-ups, remain hazy. Police now say two and not five women were killed. Local people, in the village of Babakot where the event took place, are clearly too terrorized to talk. The arrested brother of two of the women killed has reportedly taken responsibility. This seems like a replication of the pattern seen in numerous 'honour' killings, where a brother accepts blame, and is then 'forgiven' by the father of the victim, thus ensuring that under the country's Qisas and Diyat law his son escapes scot-free and no one is punished.
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9:08 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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