ABBOTABAD: A district and sessions court in Dasu sentenced one suspect to death in the Kohistan video scandal case and sentenced four more to life imprisonment, Express News reported on Thursday.
Afzal Kohistani, a native of Kohistan district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa who had previously approached the media with information on this case, had requested that it be reopened, and told The Express Tribune on January 26 that if the matter was not decided through court, a bloody feud may stretch for years between the Azadkhel and Salehkhel tribes.
Human rights activist Dr Farzana Bari, who was one of the three members of the committee formed by the Supreme Court to look into this case, had also requested that the Supreme Court reopen the case, which she says has taken a new turn.
Bari claims to have evidence that the four women who appeared in video may have already been murdered.
Background
In May 2012, Kohistani had informed local media agencies that a local jirga of his area had condemned to death five girls of the Azadkhel tribe and two boys of the Salehkhel tribe for clapping and singing at a local wedding held in March 2012. Such mingling with the opposite gender was said to go against the tribal customs of the area.
Kohistani later claimed that the four girls seen in the video, along with a teenage girl who was also present at the scene, were killed on May 30 in accordance with the tribal decree.
Upon this revelation, the Supreme Court took suo motu notice and sent a fact finding mission to the area on June 4 that reported back that the women were alive.
When the commission met Molvi Javed, the head of the jirga, it was informed that no killings had taken place. Following this finding, the case was abruptly disposed of.
Bari had added a dissenting note and had expressed reservations over the findings of the inquiry commission. However, while closing the case, then-Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Chaudhry stated in his closing order that if and when Bari can produce additional evidence, the case may be taken up again.
However, Kohistani had said that jirga authorities presented similar-looking girls to the commission which deluded court authorities into believing that the girls were alive.
After thorough investigation and reading an article in Reuters which provided evidence that the women presented in court and the women in the video only bore resemblance, Bari is sure that the women have been killed.
“There was no identity verification of the women presented, nor was there any DNA test taken that proves that the women in the video were the same that were presented before the court,” she said
On January 4, Kohistani told The Express Tribune that his three brothers Shah Faisal, Safi ud Din and Sher Wali were killed during an attack by over a dozen armed men from the Azadkhel tribe. He said that his brothers were involved in the video too, and the jirga had ordered their death as well.
Bari said that after reading about the murder of the two men in the same video and compiling documents and reports which they shared with the media regarding the case, she is sure that the women had been killed. Bari had also filed a petition for the reopening of the case last year, which was rejected by the apex court.
As per the tribal culture of Kohistan, whenever both men and women are condemned to death for violation of tribal culture, the men are punished before woman. But in this case, the women were murdered first as the accused boys went into hiding, Kohistani had said. He had added that since he was poor, “no one listened to him”. But it has now proved that the tribal custom has claimed eight lives of innocent people who did not commit an act that could be described as against the Islamic or penal laws.
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