Pakistan dad ‘shot dead’ daughter to preserve family honour after she took a photo with boys

The girl, said to be aged around 16 or 17, was fired at multiple times from a close range inside her family home in the northern town of Kohistan on Friday, local police chief Mukhtiar Ahmed said.

Authorities said the woman had been killed after a jirga, a tribal body of village elders who settle disputes according to centuries-old traditions, had ordered that she and a friend, who also appeared in the picture, be killed.

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“Some people had uploaded pictures of the two girls,” said Masood Khan, deputy superintendent of police in the Kolai-Palas district.

“They shot dead one of them while police rescued the second one,” he said, referring to villagers.

Ahmed said police teams were conducting raids to arrest the members of the jirga, including local clerics.

The videos and photographs uploaded on the social media appeared to be doctored, he said.

Kohistan, a mountainous region near Pakistan’s border with China, made global headlines in 2011 for a similar incident when four girls were killed after they appeared with boys in a video.

Around 1,000 women in Pakistan are killed yearly by close relatives on the pretext of preserving the family’s honour, according to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

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Such killings are often carried out over perceived offences such as elopement, fraternisation with men outside marriage or other infractions of religious and cultural values on female modesty, despite campaigns by rights groups and tighter laws.

The killer in most cases gets away without punishment because of a controversial Islamic clause in laws that allows relatives of the victim to pardon the perpetrator, according to Amnesty International.

Pakistan approved a law in 2016 to partially do away with the clause, but that has done little to stop the practice, the HRCP said.

Additional reporting by Reuters