Pakistan teen poisoned, choked and burned alive in 'honor killing'
Islamabad (CNN)More
than a dozen people have been arrested after a teenage girl was choked,
injected with poison, tied to a van and then burned to death.
Police
in Abbottabad in Pakistan's northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province said
the death was a so-called honor killing ordered by a tribal council
after the girl, 16-year-old Ambreen, allegedly helped a neighbor and her
boyfriend elope.
"The
order came after Ambreen's neighbor, Saima, had eloped with her
boyfriend on the 22nd of April," police officer Khurram Rasheed said.
Rasheed said the girl's killing was ordered after a 15 member tribal council, or Jirga, gathered to investigate the elopement.
The
couple that eloped has been tracked and is in a safe place, police
said. They added that those arrested will be tried in an anti-terrorism
court.
Pakistani
police escort blindfolded suspects accused of killing and setting fire
to a woman as they appear at a court in Abbottabad on May 5, 2016.
'Honor killings'
Around 1,100 women were killed by relatives in Pakistan last year, according to the country's independent Human Rights Commission.
In February, director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's film on the subject, "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness," won an Oscar for best documentary short.
"To
me honor killing is premeditated, cold-blooded murder, but the
justification given by men when they kill a woman is that she did
something without permission, or that is out of bounds of what society
deems is OK for a woman," Obaid-Chinoy said.
Pakistan
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed action after Obaid-Chinoy's film was
released, saying: "There is no honor in honor killing, in fact there can
be nothing more degrading than to engage in brutal murder and to refer
to it as honor."
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