ISLAMABAD: Police in northwest Pakistan said on Tuesday they had arrested three village elders as suspects in the murder of an 18-year old woman after village elders called for her death because she had appeared in a picture on social media.
Every year, hundreds of women in Muslim Pakistan are victims of honor killings, carried out by relatives professing to be acting in defense of a family’s honor, rights group say, most often in deeply conservative rural areas.
The latest killing took place in the remote Kohistan area of Masehra district in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa district.
“Some people had uploaded pictures of the two girls,” Masood Khan, deputy superintendent of police in the Kolai-Palas district, some 150km northwest of Mansehra, told reporers, announcing the arrests of three village elders.
Police said one woman had been killed after a council of elders, known as a jirga, had ordered that she and a friend, who also appeared in the picture, be killed.
“They shot dead one of them while police rescued the second one,” Khan said, referring to villagers.
Such killings in Pakistan are often carried out over perceived offenses such as elopement, fraternization with men outside marriage or other infractions of religious and cultural values on female modesty, despite campaigns by rights groups and tighter laws. Women have also been killed for talking to men, wearing jeans or leaving abusive homes.
Last year, an appeals court acquitted the brother of a social media star, Qandeel Baloch, of her murder, a 2016 killing that sparked national outrage and changes in laws covering honor killings.
Five women from Kohistan were allegedly killed by their families in 2012 after they were filmed on a cellphone clapping and singing in a house with two boys. Mohammed Afzal, 31, also known as Afzal Kohistani, a young rights campaigner, who fought for seven years for justice for the five victims, was killed in 2019 by his own nephew.