Killers offer daughters to avoid death penalty

ISP

Killers try to avoid the rope by offering their daughters

Pakistani girls given as child brides to pay off victims' relatives

Rory McCarthy in Islamabad
Friday July 26, 2002
The Guardian Four convicted murderers due to hang in Pakistan tomorrow have tried to escape the gallows by giving their teenage and child daughters in marriage to elderly relatives of their victims.
The supreme court stepped in after two girls, aged 14 and 15, were forced into marriage earlier this week with two men aged 77 and 55 as compensation to end a family feud. The marriages were broken off, but negotiations under tribal custom continue.
A girl of 18 is supposed to marry a man of 80, and two girls, aged three and five, were also offered as brides in the deal made in the village of Abbakhel, 150 miles south of Islamabad.
More than 4,000 villagers gathered to watch the agreement, which was negotiated by local landlords, clerics and former politicians. Traditional sweets were handed round after the deal, as the convicted men and the relatives of their victims embraced each other.
But the brides screamed for help as the wedding ceremony began on Tuesday. "The houses of the brides presented a mourning scene as shrieks and sounds of crying were heard," a Pakistani paper reported.
After reports of the agreement appeared in the local press, the supreme court ruled that the lower courts should intervene. "The compromise deal appears to have been reached in violation of the law of the land, and against the norms of the civilised world," the chief justice, Sheikh Riaz Ahmed, said.
Yesterday, apparently under pressure from the government, the mayor of the nearby town of Mianwali said the two marriages had been broken off. Witnesses said police officers had stepped in to free the teenage girls. But the mayor said negotiations between the convicts and their victims' relatives - as allowed under local traditions - continued. "Now the deal is in limbo. We are trying to find a better solution," he said.
This is the second time in a month that brutal traditions have proved more powerful than the law in Pakistan. In another village in Punjab province a a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang raped by four men after her teenage brother was accused of having a relationship with a woman from a higher-caste tribe.
In the later case the agreement was aimed at ending a family feud which began in 1954 when relatives of Sardar Khan, a teacher in Abbakhel, shot dead one of his brothers.
In 1995, 41 years later, the feud was revived when other relatives of the dead man shot and injured Khan's younger brother.
Three months later Khan and his cousin shot dead two men from the rival group of relatives.
Khan and three others were subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
After all their appeals failed, including one to President Pervez Musharraf, they called in the help of a powerful local landlord.
He helped to broker the deal earlier this week under the tradition of vani , in which a man is allowed to offer his daughter in marriage as compensation for a crime.
At first the victims' relatives asked for 20 of the convicted men's daughters and 12m rupees (130,000).
Finally they agreed to accept eight daughters and 8m rupees. Khan himself offered up a daughter of 14.

ISP

This kind of thinking is really sickening and of course it is in a place where religion is not only strong, it's immovable, in this case Islam. This religion along with Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism and every other ism is what makes this world such a rotten, stinking hellhole. In the name of religion, anybody, anywhere, has a reason or an excuse, justifiable in their minds, to commit any sort of atrocity against others, either individually or collectively. As far as I am concerned they should all be shut down and eliminated for good, and God(if there is such a thing, should hang his/her head in shame at allowing these sort of perversions to exist at all.

what's it all about?

alfie

Killers offer daughters to avoid death penalty

ISP

alfie

simplesally

rmayer32

ISP

Perry

Simon

Share this