The court ruled Wednesday that the man killed his married daughter because she had an affair out of the wedlock. The enraged father severely beat her with a baton and ultimately electrocuted her in November 2006.

Neither the father nor daughter were identified.

Like other tribal-oriented societies, many Jordanians consider sex out of the wedlock an indelible stain on the family’s honor that can only be cleansed by blood.

The 19-year-old Iraqi was, according to her father, murdered by her own in-laws, who took her to a picnic area in Dokan and shot her seven times. Her crime was to have an unknown number on her mobile phone. Her “honour killing” is just one in a grotesque series emerging from Iraq, where activists speak of a “genocide” against women in the name of religion.

In the latest such case, it was reported yesterday that a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was stabbed to death last month by her father for becoming infatuated with a British soldier serving in southern Iraq.

In Basra alone, police acknowledge that 15 women a month are murdered for breaching Islamic dress codes. Campaigners insist it is a conservative figure.

Violence against women is rampant, rising every day with the power of the militias. Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicides through self-immolation, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse masquerading as marriage of girls as young as nine are all on the increase.

Du’a Khalil Aswad, 17, from Nineveh, was executed by stoning in front of mob of 2,000 men for falling in love with a boy outside her Yazidi tribe. Mobile phone images of her broken body transmitted on the internet led to sectarian violence, international outrage and calls for reform. Her father, Khalil Aswad, speaking one year after her death in April last year, has revealed that none of those responsible had been prosecuted and his family remained “outcasts” in their own tribe.

“My daughter did nothing wrong,” he said. “She fell in love with a Muslim and there is nothing wrong with that. I couldn’t protect her because I got threats from my brother, the whole tribe. They insisted they were gong to kill us all, not only Du’a, if she was not killed. She was mutilated, her body dumped like rubbish.

“I want those who committed this act to be punished but so far they have not, they are free. Honour killing is murder. This is a barbaric act.”

Despite the outrage, recent calls by the Kurdish MP Narmin Osman to outlaw honour killings have been blocked by fundamentalists. “Honour killings are not actually a crime in the eyes of the government,” said Houzan Mahmoud, who has had a fatwa on her head since raising a petition against the introduction of sharia law in Kurdistan. “If before there was one dictator persecuting people, now almost everyone is persecuting women.

“In the past five years it is has got [much] worse. It is difficult to described how terrible it is, how badly we have been pushed back to the dark ages. Women are being beheaded for taking their veil off. Self immolation is rising – women are left with no choice. There is no government body or institution to provide any sort of support. Sharia law is being used to underpin government rule, denying women their most basic human rights.”

In August last year, the body of 11-year-old Sara Jaffar Nimat was found in Khanaqin, Kurdistan, after she had been stoned and burnt to death. Earlier this month, two brothers and a sister were kidnapped from their home near Kirkuk by gunmen in police uniforms. The brothers were beaten to death and the woman left in a critical condition after being informed that she must obey the rules of an “Islamic state”. One week ago, a journalist, Begard Huseein, was murdered in her home in Arbil, northern Iraq. Her husband, Mohammed Mustafa, stabbed her because she was in love with another man, according to local reports.

The stoning death of Ms Aswad led to the establishment of an Internal Ministry unit in Kurdistan to combat violence against women. It reported that last year in Sulaymaniyah, a city of 1 million people, there were 407 reported offences, beheadings, beatings, deaths through “family problems”, and threats of honour killings. Rape is not included as most women are too fearful to report it for fear of retribution. Nevertheless, police in Karbala recently revealed 25 reports of rape.

The new Iraqi constitution, according to Mrs Mahmoud, is a mass of confusing contradictions. While it states that men and women are equal under law it also decrees that sharia law – which considers one male witness worth two females – must be observed. The days when women could hold down key jobs or enjoy any freedom of movement are long gone. The fundamentalists have sent out too many chilling messages. In Mosul two years ago, eight women were beheaded in a terror campaign.

“It was really, really horrifying,” said Mrs Mahmoud. “Honour killings and murder are widespread. Thousands [of people] … have become victims of murder, violence and rape – all backed by laws, tribal customs and religious rules. We urge the international community, the government to condemn this barbaric practice, and help the women of Iraq.”

It was an innocent infatuation but five months after Rand, a student of English at Basra University, met Paul, a 22-year-old soldier posted to southern Iraq, she was dead. She was stamped on, suffocated and stabbed by her father. Several brutal knife wounds punctured her slender, bruised body – from her face to her feet. He had done it, he proclaimed to the neighbours who soon gathered round, to ‘cleanse his honour’.

And as Rand was put into the ground, without ceremony, her uncles spat on her covered corpse because she had brought shame on the family. Her crime was the worst they could possibly imagine – she had fallen in love with a British soldier and dared to talk to him in public.

Rand was murdered last month. That the relationship was innocent was no defence. She had been seen conversing intimately with Paul. It was enough to condemn her, because he was British, a Christian, ‘the invader’, and the enemy. The two met while he was helping to deliver relief aid to displaced families in the city and she was working as a volunteer. They continued to meet through their relief work in the following months.

Rand last saw Paul in January, two months before her death. It was only on 16 March that her father, Abdel-Qader Ali, learned of their friendship. He was told by a friend, who worked closely with police, that Rand had been seen with Paul at one of the places they both worked as volunteers. Enraged, he headed straight home to demand an explanation from his daughter.

‘When he entered the house, his eyes were bloodshot and he was trembling,’ said Rand’s mother, Leila Hussein, tears streaming down her face as she recalled her daughter’s murder. ‘I got worried and tried to speak to him but he headed straight for our daughter’s room and he started to yell at her.’

‘He asked if it was true that she was having an affair with a British soldier. She started to cry. She was nervous and desperate. He got hold of her hair and started thumping her again and again.

‘I screamed and called out for her two brothers so they could get their father away from her. But when he told them the reason, instead of saving her they helped him end her life,’ she said.

She said Ali used his feet to press down hard on his own daughter’s throat until she was suffocated. Then he called for a knife and began to cut at her body. All the time he was calling out that his honour was being cleansed.

‘I just couldn’t stand it. I fainted.’ recalled Leila. ‘I woke up in a blur later with dozens of neighbours at home and the local police.’

According to Leila, her husband was initially arrested. ‘But he was released two hours later because it was an “honour killing”. And, unfortunately, that is something to be proud of for any Iraqi man.’

At the police station where the father was held Sergeant Ali Jabbar told The Observer last week: ‘Not much can be done when we have an “honour killing” case. You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws.

‘The father has very good contacts inside the Basra government and it wasn’t hard for him to be released and what he did to be forgotten. Sorry but I cannot say more about the case.’

Rand, considered impure, was given only a simple burial. To show their repugnance at her alleged crime, her family cancelled the traditional mourner ceremony.

Two weeks after the murder, Leila left Ali. She could no longer bear to live under the same roof as her daughter’s killer and asked for a divorce. ‘I was beaten and had my arm broken by him,’ she said. ‘No man can accept being left by a woman in Iraq. But I would prefer to be killed than sleep in the same bed with a man who was able to do what he did to his own daughter, who, over the years, had only given him unconditional love.’

Now she works for a women’s organisation campaigning against honour killings. ‘I just want to try to stop other girls having the same fate as my beloved Rand,’ said Leila who is forced to move regularly from friend to friend

A colleague of Leila’s said: ‘We prefer to change places each two weeks to prevent targeting. She has been threatened again by her husband’s family and is very scared.’

Throughout her friendship with Paul, Rand confided in only one person, her best friend Zeinab, 19. ‘She used to say that her charity work had more than one meaning now. From the first time she saw him, she was helping needy families but also that Paul was helping her. With just a simple, caring smile, he was able to give her the sense of love, making her forget all about the hard and depressing life in Iraq,’ said Zeinab.

The two teenagers had spent hours talking about him,’ she said. ‘She loved to speak about his blond hair, his honey eyes, his white skin and the sweet way he had of speaking.

‘He was very different from the local men who usually are tough and illiterate. I was in heaven when she was speaking about him. Everything looked so beautiful.

‘But, I always had to remind Rand that she was a Muslim and her family was never going to accept her marrying a Christian, British soldier’.

‘Unfortunately she never wanted to hear me. Her mind was very far from reality, but closer to an impossible dream.’

Paul gave Rand gifts. She kept them – and him – secret from her family and asked Zeinab to take care of these small tokens of his affection for her. He gave her a charming cuddly animal. ‘She couldn’t take it home so she asked me to keep it for her,’ said Zeinab. ‘It’s hard to look at it every day,’ she said.

Rand told Zeinab she and Paul had met only four times, though Zeinab doubts this. Their meetings were always in public and through the voluntary work that Paul carried out as part of his regiment’s peacekeeping duties.

Rand had an excellent command of English and spoke it fluently and that, said Zeinab, allowed them to communicate freely without others around understanding what they were saying. ‘She was the only one who could speak English and it made it easier for her to get closer “through words” to him,’ she said.

Soon Rand began giving different and elaborate excuses to her family to enable her to continue her voluntary work. She persuaded her father that her work was vital in helping families. And she began paying daily visits to displacement camps, local aid agencies and hospitals in the hope of bumping into Paul.

‘He used to tell her all about England. She told me his father had died from a disease and that it was a really sad story,’ said Zeinab.

‘She liked to speak about how couples could live together in his country. He told her that flowers could be found on every corner and he promised to take her one day to buy some in the streets of London. She was a fan of London and he told her about all the tourists attractions there.’

‘But the thing she used to like talking about best was how he praised her beauty and her intelligence. She told me he called her “princess”.’

Despite knowing how dangerous the consequences of her actions could be, and the punishment she faced if caught, her passion for Paul grew stronger, said Zeinab. ‘She never did anything more than talk to him. She was proud to be a virgin and had a dream to give herself to the man she loved only after her marriage. But she was seen as an animal,’ said Zeinab.

‘What they did to her was ugly and pathetic. Rand was just a young girl with romantic dreams. She always kept her religion close to her heart. She would never even hurt a petal on a rose.’

Last year 133 women were killed in Basra – 47 of them for so-called ‘honour killings’, according to the Basra Security Committee. Out of those 47 cases there have been only three convictions for murder.

Since January this year, 36 women have been killed.

Girl’s parents got back their daughter Tasleem Mai through “Punchayat” (Local jury) with this commitment that they would send her with her husband according to their customs but they did not fulfil their commitment instead they got kidnapped the youth Ghulam Rasul through influential zamindars then they cut his hair of beard, head and moustaches forcibly. Later they tortured him to death.

Police said, “It is an outcome of honour killing, Ghulam Rasul (24) son of Allah Divaya married to Tasleem Mai (20) secretly and ran away from the home,” Kherpur Tamewali Police said that Ghulam Rasul was kidnapped with the abetment of Muhammad Akbar, Muhammad Afzal, Fazal and Abdul Waheed and tortured him brutally.

As the news reached to his parents they approached to the local landlords for his release but they continued their torture.

When he became unconscious they threw him on the road. Later he succumbed to wounds in Hospital.

Police have instituted a murder case against them however no arrest was made.

“I asked, what had these girls done?” recalled Lina. “I was told they were being held for their own protection because their families had tried to kill them. Some of them had been there for years. Others were released and later murdered. I knew this was a story I had to tell, whatever the consequences.”

Honor killings, in which women are murdered for tarnishing their family’s honor, are prevalent throughout the Middle East. In Jordan they account for one-third of all violent deaths, on the order of twenty-five a year. Although they are illegal, the murders are prosecuted leniently in a country where tribal custom and Islamic teachings often hold sway in the courts.

It’s a practice that dates back through the ages, but what’s new about honor killings in Jordan is that women like Lina have started talking about them. Her series of articles about the women in prison, published in the late 1980s in a leading Arabic-language newspaper, attracted a storm of controversy, including a number of death threats. “The subject was a taboo when I started writing about it. At first people were in a state of denial; then they accused me of being un-Jordanian, a whore, an enemy of religion,” she said. “But slowly the truth emerged.”

As Lina discovered, the motivations for the killings vary. Most common, in a culture that prizes a woman’s virginity, is an accusation of sex before marriage, although Lina estimates that in 90% of the cases the victims are virgins.

“In the small communities where honor killings often take place, a rumor that a woman was seen talking to another man is enough to ruin the family’s reputation in the eyes of society,” she said.

Other cases involve rape, often by a member of the family. In the story Lina recounts at the start of the video, the 17-year-girl was raped by a cousin from a nearby farm. After her family’s first attempt to kill her failed, she was taken into police custody. That’s where Lina first met her, during a visit from the girl’s father and son.

“I left the room for a moment with the supervisor, and the next thing we heard was a gunshot, and she was lying on the floor in a pool of blood,” said Lina. “The father and son who did this thought they were upholding the family’s honor, that they were doing the right things according to their customs and their religion.”

As Lina has strived to make clear, honor killings have nothing to do with Islam. “Nowhere in the Koran does it tell you kill women like this. In fact it’s just the opposite: it says that men and women should be treated equally,” she said.

Since her first article ran almost 20 years ago, Lina has dedicated herself to changing these perceptions. Along with women like Rana Husseini, another journalist who has publicized honor killings, and the Jordan Women’s Union, an education center and shelter for abused women, they have broken down the silence that has surrounded the issue.

But there has been no real reduction in honor killings. To achieve that, Lina believes, the law courts must start prosecuting as murderers the men who kill their female family members. Currently, under Article 98 of the Jordanian Penal Code, a man can claim “mitigating circumstances”, and receive a light custodial sentence, Lina said.

“In every murder I’ve investigated, the woman was held to be responsible for the crimes committed against her, even though she was actually the victim,” said Lina, “What we want is equality before the law. Then we will see change.”

The victim’s grandmother, Natho (60), told Newsline that her sons killed Mamta after they found a boy, Pintu (14), her schoolmate, in her room late on Friday night. Father Jagdish Singh and his brother Soni Singh then allegedly burnt her body and dumped it in a well.

The police are, however, yet to recover the body and have registered a case of murder against Singh and his two brothers, who are at large.

Natho said Mamta was dear to her, but what she did was “unacceptable” and that she “deserved” the punishment. “How could she let a boy into her room?”

“We were sleeping and were supposed to wake early because there was a wedding in the family. Around 9.30 pm, I heard a noise and went to Mamta’s room. I saw Pintu there. Seeing the boy, her father and uncles got angry and started beating her up. The beating continued till she died,” Natho said with a straight face.

“I had taken care of the girl since she was nine days old,” Natho said. “Her mother had lost her mental balance after her birth. But Mamta did a wrong thing and I will not do any kriya (last rites) for her. I am now worried about my sons.”

Mamta’s mother does not live with the family. Her father had remarried and has three minor children from his second wife.

According to Natho, Pintu, who lives next door, had managed to escape initially after he was found in Mamta’s room, but was tracked and beaten up. “We would have killed him too, but the villagers came and stopped us,” said Sarvesh, Mamta’s sister.

Pintu has been admitted to the Bulandshahr District Hospital with severe injuries. His family, however, claimed he sustained the injuries in an accident. “He fell off his motorcycle while returning home from a wedding,” said Bishi, his grandmother.

Mamta and Pintu studied in Janta Adarsh Inter College, Garhia-Manpur.

Bulandshahr SSP Rajkumar Singh said: “We haven’t found the girl’s body yet. But based on the villagers’ account, we have charged the girl’s father and uncles with murder and are trying to trace her body.”

The child, her freckled face half hidden behind a blue veil, says she does not like her husband, and begins to cry.

“I didn’t want to marry, it was my parents’ decision,” she said. “I dreamed I would be able to finish my education. I had no choice.”

Asked why she is making her daughter unhappy, Farida replies simply: “It is her life, it is her fate.”

Badakhshan’s independent MP Fauzia Kofi says she has seen an increasing number of such child brides in the last two years.

“I don’t call it marriage, I call it selling children,” she says.

“A nine or 10-year-old – you give her away for wheat and two cows.”

High prices

The cause of the trend, according to Fauzia Kofi, is poverty.

Farida and her daughter live in the village of Wandian, high in the mountains of Badakhshan and a fortnight’s journey by donkey from the nearest big town, Faizabad.

Badakhshan deputy governor Dr Mohammed Zarif reports 60 deaths from cold and hunger and the loss of 7,000 livestock over the five months that the district has been cut off from the rest of the world by snow.

Meanwhile, some food in the local market has doubled in price in the last year – a result both of Badakhshan’s inaccessibility, and of global food shortages.

The British aid agency, Oxfam, has brought them vegetable seeds and fertiliser, but villagers in Wandian say their oxen have died and they need a plough.

Fauzia Kofi believes child marriages will only end if Badakhshan gets investment to reduce poverty, and more help to improve the food supply.

A midwife in the village of Khordakhan, Hanufa Mah, agrees that alleviating poverty is key.

She says she tries to teach parents not to marry their girls too young but some feel they have no choice.

One girl she helped through labour was only 10 years old.

“The girl was so small. I held her in my lap until the child was born,” she says.

UN figures show that more women die in childbirth in Badakhshan than anywhere else in the world, and mothers under the age of 15 are most at risk.

No quick fix

Afghanistan’s finance minister Anwar al-haq Ahadi does not, however, expect regions such as Badakhshan to be lifted out of poverty quickly.

“I’m afraid it’s going to take quite a while… what we’re trying to do now is just the very basics.

“Right now we are the fourth or fifth poorest country in the world.

“We hope we will move in ranking by another two or three steps, but still, Afghanistan in five years from now will be a very poor country.”

The outlook for girls in Afghanistan’s remote villages appears bleak then, especially if global food shortages continue.

Their hopes of education are likely to be frustrated, and they will continue to face the hazards of early pregnancy.