Pakistani Girl Burned Alive for Helping Friend Elope
06.05.16
The men drugged her before they burned her alive.
More than a dozen members of an “honor council” near the Pakistani towns of Makol and Dunga Gali, outside of Abbottabad, have been arrested for immolating a 16-year-old girl, according to a local police chief.
Her supposed crime: helping a friend elope, which the men allegedly said had done irreparable harm to their village’s reputation.
The group of men, described as a jirga or local tribal council by police, detained the girl, her mother, and her brother, according to police chief Saeed Wazir. The latter two allegedly consented to the punishment: burning the girl, named in some reports as Ambreen or Haleema, in the van used by the couple to elope.
“The jirga members… decided to punish the girl in a novel way so no one in future can dare to marry without consent of their parents and give a bad name to the village,” Wazirtold NBC. “They tied her hands with the seats and then poured [gasoline] on her and the vehicle and set it on fire.”
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The term jirga, Khan told The Daily Beast, can just mean “a mediator, and that can be even one person” in that region. It doesn’t have to be a formal body, as suggested in many news reports.
