KARACHI: The police has arrested one man and two women who have been accused with triple homicide of a couple and their unborn child, who were mysteriously murdered at their residence on November 21.
The homicide, which had been labeled a suicide by the couple’s family, was under strict investigation by the police.
“Their manner of death was suspicious, we knew it wasn’t a suicide,” said SPO Surjani Altaf Hussain.
Kashif was an accountant who was under investigation for having swindled around a million rupees from the bank. His wife Mehwish was five-months pregnant. Their bodies were found after a 20-hour delay, with bullets shot through their heads, a suicide note and the murder weapon (an unlicensed TT pistol) placed near by.
The couple lived in Sector 35/A, Lyari Expressway, Surjani Town. Their family claimed that the couple had committed suicide because of the shame brought upon by the inquiry. Kashif’s brother Asim discovered the dead bodies as he broke into their house. They were immediately taken to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital in an Edhi ambulance. Even though the couple’s family has not registered an FIR, the police have lodged it on the behalf of the government.
The police had serious doubts about the microfinance bank involvement in the case and interrogated them, however their involvement in the homicide could not be proved. The police then interrogated the couple’s neighbours. Amongst the neighbours, they found Asad who coincidently is a security guard at Kashif’s bank.
During the investigation Asad confessed that he had plotted the couple’s murder with his wife Rashida, sister-in-law Shakeela and his brother Kaleemullah. The police immediately raided their residence and took them in custody. Kaleemullah had reportedly fled soon after committing the crime.
On finding that his wife Rashida was pregnant again Asad was suspicious, as he had taken necessary precaution after their first child. After close questioning Asad learnt that Kashif had raped Rashida two months ago and that she had vowed to kill him. The brothers and their wives plotted the murder to avenge Rashida’s honour.
After careful planning they went over to the couples house. First Asad raped a pregnant Mehwish and later they mixed poison in the milk. Kashif and Mehwish were then forced to write a suicide note and then shot in the head.
ISLAMABAD: A girl in Pakistan’s Punjab province became victim of ‘honour killing’ when she was axed to death by her father and close relatives for allegedly having an affair with a boy of her locality.
The girl was killed after her father, Farooq Khan Baloch, became suspicious that his daughter was having an affair with Amjad, a youngster in Jhang tehsil in Punjab province.
Seeing them together, Farooq along with relatives Sher Khan, Asghar Khan and Riaz Khan, axed the girl to death, while the boy managed to escape, the Dawn daily reported.
The police have registered a case, it said. ‘Honour killing’ is widespread among rural Muslim tribes in Pakistan where the victim is mostly female. The spilling of blood under the garb of honour is mostly at the behest of close family members with the aim of undoing the perceived loss of wider family status owing to the actions of the victim.
Ghazala, a woman in Punjab province’s Joharabad, was set on fire by her brother on 6 January 1999. She was murdered because her family suspected her of having an ‘illicit’ relationship with a neighbour.
Women in Pakistan face death by shooting, burning or killing with axes if they are deemed to have brought shame on the family. They are killed for supposed ‘illicit’ relationships, for marrying men of their choice, for divorcing husbands.
They are even murdered by their kin if they are raped as they are thereby deemed to have brought shame on their family. Often, the truth of the suspicion does not matter – merely the allegation is enough to bring dishonour on the family and therefore justifies the slaying.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — A Saudi court will review the case of a teenage gang rape victim sentenced to jail and flogging after she was convicted of violating the country’s strict sex segregation laws, the foreign minister said Tuesday.
Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, center, attended the Mideast peace conference Tuesday.
The remarks by Prince Saud al-Faisal, made in the United States and carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, were the latest in response to a salvo of international condemnation of Saudi judicial authorities’ handling of the case.
It was also a sharp turn from a statement Saturday in which the Saudi Justice Ministry condemned the 19-year-old woman as an adulteress who had allegedly confessed to cheating on her husband. She was raped by seven men and then sentenced to six months prison and 200 lashes.
In the statement, the ministry said the flogging sentence would be carried out and condemned foreign interference. The statement likely sought to ease international outrage over the case by discrediting the woman.
On Tuesday, SPA quoted al-Faisal as saying “the Saudi judiciary will review the case.”
But al-Faisal was also on the defensive and maintained the case was being used against Saudi authorities.
“What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people,” he said, speaking in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was attending the U.S.-hosted Mideast peace conference.
Known only as the “Girl from Qatif,” the victim said she was a newlywed who was meeting a high school friend in his car to retrieve a picture of herself from him when the attack occurred in the eastern city of Qatif in 2006.
While she was in the car, two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area where others waited, and then she was raped.
The ministry’s account Saturday alleged that the woman and her lover met in his car for a tryst “in a dark place where they stayed for a while.”
The girl was initially sentenced to prison and 90 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her. An appeals court then doubled the lashes to 200.
The increase in sentence received heavy coverage in the international media and prompted expressions of astonishment from the U.S. government. Canada called it “barbaric.”
Under Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islamic Sharia law, women are not allowed in public in the company of men other than their male relatives. Also, women in Saudi Arabia are often sentenced to flogging and even death for adultery and other crimes.
The seven men convicted of gang raping the woman were given prison sentences of two to nine years.
The case has sparked rare domestic debate about the Saudi legal system, which gives judges wide discretion in sentencing and where rules of evidence are shaky and sometimes no lawyers are present.
Justice in Saudi Arabia is administered by a system of religious courts and judges appointed by the king on the recommendation of the Supreme Judicial Council. Those courts and judges have complete discretion to set sentences, except in cases where Sharia outlines a punishment, such as capital crimes.
That means that no two judges would likely hand down the same sentence for similar crimes. A rapist, for instance, could receive anywhere from a light or no sentence to death, depending on the judge’s discretion.
ARBIL, Iraq – At least 27 women have died in so-called ‘honour killings’ over the past four months in northern Kurdish Iraq, an official from the regional government said Monday.
Aziz Mohammed, human rights minister in the Kurdish regional government, said 10 of the murdered women were from the Arbil, 11 from Dohuk and six from Sulaimaniyah—the three provinces making up the Kurdish region.
‘These are alleged honour killings. We can say that the violence against women continues’ in Kurdish Iraq, Mohammed told AFP.
He said 97 women — 60 in Arbil, 21 in Dohuk and 16 in Sulaimaniyah—had attempted to commit suicide by self-immolation during the four months.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq has regularly highlighted ‘honour killings’ of Kurdish women as among Iraq’s most severe human rights abuses.
Most of such crimes are reported as deaths due to accidental fires in the home.
Aso Kamal, a 42-year-old British Kurdish Iraqi campaigner, says that from 1991 to 2007, 12,500 women were murdered for reasons of ‘honour’ or committed suicide in the three Kurdish provinces.
AMMAN, 26 November 2007 (IRIN) – A quarter of all women killed in Jordan for having an illicit relationship die merely because they were suspected of involvement in such a relationship, while only 15 per cent are killed after adultery is proven, a study by UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has revealed.
The study was unveiled on 25 November to mark the UN global campaign entitled Sixteen Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women, organised by UNIFEM.
Whether victims turn out to have been virgins or not seems to make little difference to the sentences handed down to the perpetrators; the killers often get 6-12 months, in keeping with legal precedents.
The study, designed to shed light on “honour killings”, an important social phenomenon in Jordan, included the testimonies of murderers as well as the victims of violence.
“They put me in the guest room and everybody started suggesting how I should kill myself. Even my aunt said everybody should leave the house to allow me to turn on a gas cylinder and kill myself. My brother suggested I hang myself with a rope. I tried to run away but I could not. They kept me in a cupboard under the stairs and gave me a little food every four to five days. I even called out to neighbours to give me food because it was not enough. One day my brother took me to a deserted area and began beating me with a rock,” said one girl after her family tried to kill her on suspicion of being pregnant out of wedlock.
The victim’s brother severely beat her and slashed her with a knife before leaving her to die in an abandoned area near Baqaa refugee camp.
An urban phenomenon?
Most “honour” crimes were committed in the kingdom’s main cities rather than in rural areas, normally dominated by conservative tribes, according to the study. Between 2000 and 2003, there were as many as 36 cases of murder in Amman, 17 in Irbid (120km north of Amman), 13 in Balqa (30km west of Amman) and 11 in Zarqa (30km east of Amman). However, the number of crimes in the conservative city of Maan, near the Saudi border, was two, and in Tafelah (200km south Amman), three.
Figures also showed that 45.1 percent of crimes were committed by the victims’ brothers, 15 percent by husbands and 14 percent by a close relative.
According to the study, at least 97 women were killed for “honour reasons” or in a family dispute in 2000-2003.
Princess Bassma, aunt of Jordan’s King Abdullah and a champion of women’s rights, said during a ceremony marking the release of the study that violence against women not only caused suffering and trauma to the victims but also affected their families and society as a whole.
“Such suffering comes in different forms – fear, arbitrary deprivation of freedom to take part in private and public life, as well as psychological and physical suffering,” she said.
The study showed that family members drop charges against perpetrators in at least 63.3 per cent of cases, which makes it easy for the murderer to get away with a minimum sentence.
Human rights activists have been lobbying for an amendment to the penal code so that tough penalties on “honour” killers are imposed, but their efforts have been fiercely resisted by conservative politicians.
In addition to “honour killings”, the study tackled violence against women in general. It found that nearly 25 women have been killed as a result of physical abuse by family members between 2000 and 2003.
As many as 4,624 cases of abuse against women were reported from January to August 2007 across the country. This was revealed by Madadgar Helpline for children and women suffering from violence and abuse in a press release issued on the occasion of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to be observed on Sunday (tomorrow).
Out of total 4,624 cases, 935 women were killed, 104 murdered after committing rape, 416 were raped and 160 became victim of gang rape while 809 were tortured physically, 485 became victim to Karo-Kari, 166 burnt alive, 642 kidnapped. The report claimed that 129 women were reported as victim of police torture, while 576 had committed suicide, and 127 women became victims to trafficking and 75 were arrested under Hudood cases.
The eight years statistics (since January 2000 to August 2007) showed the number of reported cases of violence against women stood at 55,051 in the country. The categorical breakdown of total figure showed that 10,812 women were murdered, 287 killed after rape, 5,381 subjected to sexual abuses, 11,414 subjected to physical torture, 5,433 fell prey to Karo-Kari, 1,779 burnt alive and 9,689 were kidnapped.
At least 1,010 women were subjected to torture by police, 8,192 committed suicide, 533 fell victim to trafficking and 521 were arrested under the Hudood cases. In the last seven years, out of 55,051 cases 12,124 were reported in Sindh, 34,981 in Punjab, 5,897 in NWFP and 2,049 in Balochistan.
Advocate Zia Ahmed Awan, President Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA) said the increasing number of cases relating to human rights violations had proved to be burdensome for organizations, which were working in this field. He said women could never be protected without creating awareness among the police, the judiciary and society about their rights.
She has been kidnapped, tortured, shot at, beaten and, at 16, forced into marriage with a stranger twice her age.
And for the past five years Sara Ali has been tracked across Britain by an army of bounty hunters… bounty hunters paid for by her own family.
Now 22, divorced and living near Newcastle with the father of her two-year-old child, Sara is a victim of so-called “honour crime”, a never-ending nightmare that began when she was just 11 years old.
This, in her own words, is the story of a young girl who eventually found the courage to stand up to her Asian family:
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“We lived in a really big nine-bedroom Victorian house and it was always mad busy. My dad had two wives, so there were 11 of us.
My mum had married him in Pakistan after he claimed his wife back in the UK was dying. England was this fantasy, a picture-perfect country with money, so her father agreed to the match.
I had a good childhood, I was popular at school and was pretty much allowed to do what I wanted. But it all started to change when I was 11 years old and taken to Pakistan where men kept asking my parents if they could marry me … Mum and Dad were under a lot of cultural pressure.
I just thought it was all pretend and even when one of my sisters overheard my parents discussing my engagement I just thought this was the sort of thing that happened to big girls, not to me.
Then, when I turned 14 and was back in the UK, there was a phone call from Pakistan asking when I was going over there to be married.
All hell broke loose when I said I wouldn’t go. And it was then that the mental and physical torture began.
My father would drop to the floor, clutching his chest saying I was giving him a heart attack. My brothers and sisters told me they would kill themselves because of the shame I was bringing to the family.
I got a really bad beating from my dad. I locked myself in my bedroom but he kicked the door off its hinges and screamed at me, ‘I’m going to burn you alive.’
I remember being so scared I lay shivering from fear in my room. In the night I crept downstairs and ran to the local police station.
I was put into foster care but eventually my family got in touch and I ended going back to them because I was just so scared they would kill me if I disobeyed them.
But when I got home, things just got worse. They called me “dirt” and an “outcast”. I had to cook my own food in different pots and pans from the rest of the family.
A little while later, when I was 15, they tricked me into travelling to Pakistan by getting my grandma to phone to tell me she was really ill and wanted to see everyone before she died. I was so naive.
We all flew over, but when we arrived they drove straight past my grandma’s house. They told me I was being taken to a remote village to be married. I had no passport, no money – and no hope. I was just a child.
The wedding day was held on my 16th birthday to a man who was 40 and looked like my dad with big bushy hair, a big moustache and a pockmarked face.
I begged him to help me, saying I did not want to marry him but he told me: “Why would I say no to a walking visa?”
I knew it was hopeless, but I even told the priest during the ceremony I did not want to marry this old man, but he just carried on.
On the wedding night I had to go to my “husband’s” house where he tried to rape me. I was 16, and had never even kissed a boy before. I’d only ever held hands.
He was an animal. He held my arms and pinned me down. He started licking me and bit me like a dog. I kicked and screamed the place down which probably saved me, but still I felt like I wanted to pour bleach all over my body I felt so dirty.
In the end he pulled my trousers down and screamed in my face: “I’m not going to keep you as a wife. I’m going to use you and abuse you because you’re just a slag!”
He beat me violently and tried to rape me again but I made so much noise that his family stopped him in case someone outside the house heard. After that I kept a knife hidden under my pillow.
The next month I flew back to England with my family while he waited for his visa to join us. I went back to college for a bit, but I was messed up and started drinking. I tried to kill myself several times and even threw myself into the canal but I was always dragged back home, without any help or sympathy.
Six months after the marriage I was told my husband was coming to England to live with us and I realised I had to escape. That’s when I ran away to Wales, and over time met and fell in love with a white boy.
I thought at last that I was safe and that they would never find me. But I was wrong …
One day about 80 people turned up outside my flat – they were everywhere – blocking the road. Friends, relatives, friends of friends, neighbours of friends of friends.
When I opened the door I was slapped in the face and dragged back to a car by my hair and driven to my parents’ house.
When they got me home, my parents told me I had to sleep with my vile husband but I refused. I begged my father to kill me rather than put me through this daily hell. In total I think I ran away about half a dozen times, but they always found me – even in women’s refuges.
They paid these strangers to find me, bounty hunters, giving them my picture, my national insurance number and they showed it round, asking for me.
Eventually, I plotted with my boyfriend to run away, but it went wrong as we were spotted by a relative. We were followed by 15 cars and my brother pulled in front, forcing us to emergency stop. He got his arm through the window, flicked the lock and grabbed me by the hair, pulling me onto the road.
The police heard about it and told my family to take me to the police station. Dozens of my relatives waited outside, but the police helped me escape to a refuge.
But again they tracked me down and threatened to kill my sister if I didn’t go with them.
They forced me to go Pakistan and kept me with my so-called husband’s family in terror for nine months, telling me I was there to make babies.
I had two guards outside my door and was beaten regularly and one time I was kept in hospital with internal bleeding when his brother beat me with a chair.
They would say: “It’s not England. If we bury you now, nobody will come looking. They have no authority over here.”
I was even shot at because they said I had disrespected their brother, but it missed and went over my shoulder, I’m still deaf in one ear.
I eventually managed to slip out and phone a youth worker in the UK. It was an answer machine and I left a message: “Please get me out of here. They are going to kill me. If you don’t hear from me in the next few weeks, assume that I’m dead!”
Afterwards my husband’s family found out I had used a phone and threw me into a river, breaking my arm. But the youth worker contacted immigration who arranged for a judge to have me sent back to the UK.
I never went back to my parents and now I have a beautiful family of my own. I was in heaven until a few months ago when, out of the blue and after changing my name by deed poll I received a letter from that man, a petition for a divorce.
I was terrified, he’d simply found me by paying £14.99 to a tracker agency. But if I must, I will simply move again … people who lose hope, lose everything.’
Dying of shame
Around 5,000 women a year – 13 a day – die worldwide in “honour” crimes, according to the United Nations.
In Britain figures show 13 people die every year in honour killings, but police and support groups believe it is many more.
The Metropolitan Police are investigating 200 deaths they believe are linked to honour killings.
In a BBC poll of 500 young British Asians last year, a shocking 10 per cent believed honour killings were justified.
Around 250 forced marriages are reported to the Home Office Forced Marriage Unit every year, a third of which are children as young as 12 years old.
The suicide rate of Asian women aged 16 to 24 is three times the national average.
Sara’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
A new documentary called Maria’s Grotto which premiered in Ramallah on Friday explores the issue of honor killings through the heart-breaking stories of four Palestinian women.
Directed by Palestinian director Buthina Canaan Khoury, the 53-minute documentary is the result of two years of groundwork and filming, Reuters News Agency reported.
The film begins in Maria’s Grotto, the film’s namesake, which is said to be the burial place of a girl called Maria, who lived in a village 20 kilometers east of Ramallah in the 1930s.
According to a village elder, Maria’s family suspected that she had an illicit affair. After they killed her in the Grotto, they examined her and found out she was virgin. “Maria was innocent,” the old lady recounts.
The second story is the more recent tragedy of Hayam, a 35-year-old woman who got pregnant with a Christian man from a neighboring village. When her family discovered her pregnancy in her eighth month, they forced her to take poison.
Khoury tried in vain to get the girl’s family to speak on film. But local police officers said they had to detain the Hayam’s boyfriend to protect him after Hayam’s family reportedly burnt down houses and a factory belonging to the man’s family.
Among the people interviewed, is an old woman who supports honor killing: “Disgrace is not a simple thing. Honor is the next precious value after land,” she said.
The movie also tells the story of a girl who miraculously survived after being stabbed seven times by her brother: “He didn’t ask me anything…he just tried to kill me,” she recalled.
The brother, whose face was blurred on screen like his sister’s, said he regretted his crime, but explained the social pressure he faced: “I was devastated by people’s words and looks. Everybody was asking, ‘Why don’t you kill her? Aren’t you a man?’ I wished she could have escaped while I was trying to kill her.”
Although the brother turned himself in, three quarters of the police officers lauded his act as “honorable,” the film shows.
The Palestinian Minister of Women’s Affairs Khouloud Daibes said in a press conference that honor killings are on the rise in Palestinian territories.
Human rights groups said 20 to 50 women have been killed for honor reasons since the beginning of 2007 and that culprits usually get away with light sentences.
Minister of Justice Ali Al-Khashan said that a new law is being drafted and will be presented to President Mahmoud Abbas to impose strict penalties on perpetrators of this type of crime.
Khoury is an independent Palestinian filmmaker who focuses on women’s social and political problems. She has a Bachelors degree in Filmmaking and Photography from the Massachusetts College of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.
Her first documentary, Women in Struggle (2004), was awarded four prizes and translated to six languages.
All the women in the family say Wafa Wahdan was wonderful.
But her sisters-in-law add that they noticed a few little things. She had changed the way she dressed in the past year to a less conservative style and she sometimes went out for a drive without saying where she was going.
A few weeks ago, the body of the young mother of four was found in a garbage dump east of town. Police arrested two of the woman’s male cousins for having trapped Ms. Wahdan and shot her to death, committing the third “honor killing” in Qalqilya last month.
Wahdan’s brutal murder devastated her husband and immediate family, who say that the rumor mill’s tales of Wahdan having an affair were untrue. But regardless of their veracity, suspicion alone can be enough to get a woman killed by distant relatives looking to “cleanse” the family honor when there is talk of an illicit relationship.
According to local organizations, such murders have risen in the Palestinian territories to nearly 50 this year – a fact that many here blame on the absence of any true law and order, which allows individuals to enforce their own version of justice. Palestinians here say the image of an ever-weaker Palestinian Authority has increased after Hamas’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June, making this local vigilantism harder to combat.
Particularly galling to many here is the fact that a man who admits to murdering a female relative for reasons of honor can be sentenced to as little as six months in jail. Palestinians say that policy is based on an old Jordanian law, which still holds in the West Bank: Article 341 considers murder a legitimate act of defense when the killer acts “in defense of his life or his honor.”
Saed Taha, dean of Qalqilya’s College of Islamic Law, says that honor killings in the Palestinian territories are never carried out according to proper Muslim stipulations and thus are unacceptable according to sharia, or Islamic law. In Islam, an unmarried woman found guilty of having an affair can be sentenced to 100 lashes; for a married woman, the sentence is death by stoning. But first, four witnesses must say they saw the illicit act with their own eyes.
“When the sentence is only six months, the consequence is that [perpetrators] encourage others to do the same,” says Dr. Taha. “Islam does not allow anyone to take the law into his own hands. And for a woman to be sentenced [for illicit affairs], it would have to take place in a system that operates under Islamic law, which we don’t have right now.”
Tribal traditions are often a motive
But ancient tribal mores, not Islam, are usually what drive family members to demand that their honor be restored. In this case, according to several of Wahdan’s relatives interviewed for this story, the men of the family met and came to a joint decision that Ms. Wahdan should be killed.
“These men have no fear of God,” says Wahdan’s mother, Umm el-Walid. She pulls out of a photograph of her daughter, big-eyed and pretty, sitting with some of Mrs. Walid’s now-motherless grandchildren.
“Had my daughter had an extramarital relationship, her husband would have been the first to notice and do something,” says Wahdan’s mother, stopping to squint out tears. “They charged her, sentenced her, and executed her all in one fell swoop.”
Her children harassed in school
Hala Wahdan, a sister-in-law, says the other women in the family, who are now trying to take care of the late woman’s children, are devastated. The oldest kids, aged 9 and 12, are being harassed in school.
“Her children are extremely affected by this, especially with people gossiping and saying things that aren’t true,” she says. “They tell her 9-year-old girl, Noura, ‘You’re the daughter whose mother was killed because of honor.’ And to the 12-year-old son, ‘Your mother was killed because she was messing around.’ ”
Just days after Wahdan’s murder, two other young women – sisters Sima and Eman el-Adel – were killed. Under questioning, police say, their brother confessed to having killed both of them in defense of the family honor. The word around this town of 60,000, however, is that they were having an inheritance dispute.
Women’s rights activists say that nearly any perpetrator of a female relative’s murder can make an “honor killing” claim, when in fact quite different motives may be present.
“We consider the law here to be permitting these crimes, and whoever commits these crimes knows that he will only be punished with six months in jail,” says Margaret Ir-Rai, spokeswoman for Qalqilya’s Jafra Center for Women. “Therefore, our battle is with the law, which we need to change. Many people … hide behind the killing by saying it had an ‘honor motive,’ and [are] exonerated.”
Ms. Ir-Rai says that while it is possible for victims’ survivors to press charges in a civil court, they rarely do so because of the fear it will unleash a cycle of continued vengeance-taking and bloodshed.
The Jafra Center has launched a new awareness campaign on this issue and holds workshops throughout the West Bank for women, who often contribute to the phenomena. They place ultrastrict expectations on other women and accuse others of unchaste behavior, sometimes assisting in and even committing honor crimes as well. That’s why the law needs to push ahead, she says, pulling societal norms with it.
“The only way for women here to get their rights is through a change in the law, not through societal pressure,” she says. “We started a petition all over the West Bank to have people condemn this.” The women’s groups are also lobbying members of the Palestinian Legislative Council to pass legislation that would carry much heavier sentences for men who commit honor crimes. “Unfortunately, the political situation is not helping us to make this happen,” Ir-Rai says.
The Palestinian parliament rarely meets these days, its functionality cast into doubt since the violent Fatah-Hamas split over the summer. She points to the ensuing uncertainty as a reason for the increase in honor killings.
Call to religious leaders: speak out
Jafra counts 21 such murders in the West Bank so far this year. There have been 25 honor killings in Gaza since the beginning of the year, says Maryam Abu Daqqa, the head of the Union of Women’s Committees.
“During these hard times Gaza is going through, it is difficult for women’s organizations to do anything more than condemn,” she says. “And with a lack of clear judiciary oversight, with the confusion created by Hamas and Fatah, people are taking the law into their own hands and directing their anger against the weak link: women.”
Other women here complain that religious leaders should be more vocal about Islam’s view on the matter.
“We haven’t heard anyone from any group go to the mosque and condemn it. If you ask people on the street, you’ll find they support it, and that the families are happy when they’ve cleansed the family honor,” says another women’s activist who asked not to be named. “I cannot go to the street and condemn this based on women’s rights. They’ll say whoever is defending her is just like her.”
Irshad Ali, 22, and Nusrat, 20, a newly-married couple became the latest victim of Karo Kari on Thursday, November 8, 2007. The obsolete tradition of rural areas, which is unfortunately still in practice today, has claimed so many lives in the recent past. However, in this case, the couple came to Karachi to save themselves. Unfortunately, however, they fell for the false promises made by their family members. The murderers are still at large and there is a possibility that they will never pay the price of their crime.
The couple, who belonged to Larkana district, were also closely related to each other. They got married a few months back in the court of Khairpur district. According to the local police, the Irshad and Nusrat were much older than what their relatives had said.
Arbab Bibi, 50, the mother of deceased Irshad, claimed that her only son (along with his bride) was murdered on the pretext of karo kari – a discriminatory practice, in which punishment for the ‘guilty’ parties is death for bringing disgrace to the family.
According to the Investigation Officer (IO) and Sub Inspector (SI) Aziz Chohan, the couple was gunned down in Charag Colony, Shah Lateef Town police limits. Irshad belonged to Shahzadpur while Nusrat was the resident of Larkana district, Chohan told The News. Furthermore, during their short stay in Sukkur, the couple also arranged a press conference to inform the media and people about the death threats they received from their families and heads of the tribe of their village. Arbab who lodged FIR number 413/2007 at Shah Latif Town Police Station, also nominated the brothers-in-law of her deceased son, Mansoor, Amjad and Muzaffar along with Liaquat and Imdad, the cousins of the deceased Nusrat in the crime. Bibi took the body of her beloved son and daughter-in-law to their native town for the funeral proceedings.
The IO said that the couple was living in Charag Colony, a locality of Gulistan Society when they migrated to Karachi but on that fateful day, the nominated came to their house and opened fire on the couple. The unfortunate couple expired on the spot. Moreover, the couple was also somehow in contact with the girl’s family and they had received a message from their relatives that they were ready to accept the marriage so they could come back home. According to Chohan, this message was sent by Nusrat’s brothers and it seemed that it was a trick to trace their location. “The accused are still missing and the family’s support is needed to arrest the culprits,” said Chohan.