Father, three relatives arrested over Kohistan honour killing

PESHAWAR (Reuters/Web Desk) : Police have arrested four people, including a man who killed his teenage daughter, on instructions from family elders because she had appeared in a picture on social media, police said on Wednesday.

The police said the 18-year-old woman was shot dead by her father last week in Kolai-Palas district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after her relatives advised him to do so. Kolai-Palas was formerly a sub-division of Kohistan, a district in Hazara Division.

The relatives also called for a so-called honour killing of the woman’s friend who appeared with her in the picture, but she had been rescued by the police, officials said.

The father, Arslan Mohsin, and three relatives have been arrested and produced before a court, police official Masood Khan told Reuters, adding that more arrests were pending.

Every year, hundreds of women in Pakistan are victims of honour killings, carried out by relatives professing to be acting in defence of a family’s honour, rights group say, often in deeply conservative rural areas.

Public images of women are considered taboo in the tribal and other remote areas.

Reuters was unable to immediately reach for comment the women’s families or elders involved in the case.

The lawmakers have called for strict punishment for the alleged killers, and rights groups have expressed concerns over the country’s failure to stamp out such crimes.

Despite tighter laws and societal outrage in Pakistan, honour killings continue, with 384 instances reported by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in 2022 alone, said Nadia Rahman of South Asia regional office at Amnesty International.

“The Government of Pakistan and law enforcement agencies are urged to provide protection to the survivors in this case and prosecute those involved without recourse to the death penalty,” she added.