Nearly 1,100 women were killed by relatives in Pakistan last year

By Dan Wooding, Founder of ASSIST News Service

LAHORE, PAKISTAN

According to the BBC, Police say the body of Zeenat Rafiq shows signs of torture. She was doused with fuel and set alight. Her mother Parveen is accused of luring her back from her in-laws.

“It is the third such case in a month in Pakistan, where attacks on women who go against conservative Islamic rules on love and marriage are common,” said the BBC story.

“Last week a young school teacher, Maria Sadaqat, was set on fire in Murree near Islamabad for refusing a marriage proposal. She died of her injuries.”

A month earlier village elders near Abbottabad ordered the murder of a teenage girl who was burnt to death because she helped a friend to elope, police said.

Zeenat Rafiq, who was 18, had been burnt and there were signs of torture and strangulation, police told BBC Urdu. A post mortem examination may establish if she was still alive when she was set on fire.

Police Superintendent Ibadat Nisar said officers were looking for her brother who is “on the run”. Her mother was found in the house with the body.

“Her mother has confessed to the crime, but we find it hard to believe that a 50-year-old woman committed this act all by herself with no help from the family members,” he said.

The BBC said that neighbors contacted authorities after hearing screaming, but Ms. Rafiq was already dead by the time police arrived, BBC reporter Saba Eitizaz says.

Ms. Rafiq and her husband, Hassan Khan, married a week ago through the courts after eloping. They went to live with his family.

“When she told her parents about us, they beat her so severely she was bleeding from her mouth and nose,” Mr Khan told BBC Urdu.

“Her family lured her back, promising reconciliation and a proper wedding reception. She was afraid, she said 'they are not going to spare me'. She didn't want to go but my family convinced her. How were we to know they would kill her like this?”

Attitudes ‘unchanged’

Nearly 1,100 women were killed by relatives in Pakistan last year in so-called honor-killings, the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) says. Many more cases go unreported.

Violence against women by those outside the family is also common.

Najam U Din, a joint director of the HRCP, said that societal attitudes had not changed in line with greater education and freedom for young women.

“So when women become more assertive, more reluctant to be content with submissive survival within the family - for example when they insist on studying further, or when they want to take independent decisions about themselves - then the society does not allow it.”

Punjab province, where the two latest attacks happened, passed a landmark law in February criminalizing all forms of violence against women.

However, more than 30 religious groups, including all the mainstream Islamic political parties, threatened to launch protests if the law was not repealed.

The Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises the government, then proposed making it legal for husbands to “lightly beat” their wives. It was criticized as a result.

Religious groups have equated women’s rights campaigns with promotion of obscenity. They say the new Punjab law will increase the divorce rate and destroy the country’s traditional family system.

Photo captions: 1) Zeenat Rafiq, pictured here on her marriage certificate, wed Hassan Khan last week. 2) Maria Sadaqat suffered burns all over her body and died three days later. 3) Hassan Khan said his wife’s parents had “lured her back,” promising a wedding reception. 4) Norma and Dan Wooding.

About the writer: Dan Wooding, 75, is an award-winning winning author, broadcaster and journalist who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, and is now living in Southern California with his wife Norma, to whom he has been married for nearly 53 years. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren, who all live in the UK. Dan is the founder and international director of the ASSIST News Service (ANS), and the author or co-author of some 45 books, the latest is Mary My Story from Bethlehem to Calvary (http://marythebook.com). Dan has a weekly radio show and two TV programs all based in Southern California. Before moving to the US, Dan was a senior reporter with two of the UK’s largest circulation newspapers and was also an interviewer for BBC Radio One in London.

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