3 sentenced in Kohistan wedding video killing

PESHAWAR: A court has sentenced three men to life in prison for the murder of women filmed enjoying themselves at a wedding in Kohistan, in a notorious years-old case that spotlighted so-called “honour killings”.

The case emerged in 2012 when a local cleric was accused of ordering the deaths of male and female guests filmed at a wedding. Three of the women in the video were murdered, district public prosecutor Attaullah told AFP on Thursday.

Those convicted included Umar Khan, the brother of one murdered woman, and Saier Khan and Sabeer Khan, fathers of the other two, he said.

“The court on Thursday awarded life imprisonment to three men each for murder, while five others were acquitted,” he told AFP. The defendants’ lawyer Sarfaraz Khan said they would fight the decision in a higher court.

The 2012 video showed the women clapping as a man danced in the mountainous area of Kohistan, 110 miles north of the capital Islamabad. Men and women had allegedly been in the room together, in defiance of the patriarchal notion of “honour” at the heart of strict tribal customs that separate men and women at weddings—though the video does not show them together. A relative of those in the video, Afzal Kohistani, claimed the women in the video had been killed and took the rare step of pushing the case before the media and the justice system. The Supreme Court investigated, but a fact-finding team met women who were purportedly those shown in the video and ruled they were alive.

One of the members of the fact-finding team, activist Farzana Bari, told AFP Thursday that she had long disagreed with the decision, fearing the women the team met were imposters.

Kohistani also insisted that the women shown to the officials were imposters, and that the death sentences were carried out. In March this year he was gunned down in Abbottabad.