Honour Killing
Pakistan: Police investigates teenage girl's 'honour killing' over viral photo
Kohistan/Pakistan: Authorities in Pakistan are probing the "honour killing" of an eighteen-year-old girl, who was shot dead by her father and uncle last week on the orders of the village elders, due to her appearance in a viral photo, BBC reported.
Police said the 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.
The incident happened in the country's Kohistan region
Some relatives of the dead woman were among the suspects, police told Reuters.
Her father was arrested on a murder complaint, and her uncle is on the run, police said, according to Reuters.
"Some people had uploaded pictures of the two girls," said Masood Khan, deputy superintendent of police in the Kolai-Palas district in the mountains of northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border, reported Reuters.
"They shot one of them while police rescued the second one," he told Reuters, referring to villagers.
The man in the picture is being held in protective custody; the jirga wanted him dead, too, the BBC report said.
According to authorities, two other people—a young woman and a young man—also got death threats after their Photoshopped images went viral on Pakistani social media, BBC reports.
Authorities said they are looking into who took the images in both incidents, which appeared to have been manipulated and shared on phoney social media profiles.
The second woman was placed under protective custody by the local police, but she was later released to her family following a court hearing in which she claimed there was no risk to her life at home.
In 2011, three Kohistani women were murdered after appearing in a wedding video, sparking a deadly blood feud that resulted in four additional killings.
The incident prompted calls for action against honour killings. In 2016, Pakistan amended laws to mandate life sentences for such crimes, but killers continue to escape justice.
Notably, last year, the brother of social media star Qandeel Baloch was acquitted of her murder on appeal, despite a previous life sentence, citing family honour as the motive.
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