The Daily Mail UK
written by Staff
Monday July 23, 2012
An Afghan man shot his two teenage daughters dead when they returned home four days after running away with a young man, police said today.
The father has been detained on murder charges in Nad Ali district in the southern province of Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban insurgency, provincial police spokesman Farid Ahmad Farhang said.
'He killed two of his daughters. His daughters had run away with a young man four days ago. When they returned home their father killed them,' Mr Farhang said.
Police have issued an arrest warrant for the young man, who is said to be working as an interpreter with Nato forces in the southern province, the spokesman added.
Relations between men and women outside marriage are strictly controlled under Islam and infringements are harshly punished by most families in ultra-conservative Afghanistan.
Despite progress since the fall of the Taliban, so-called 'honour killing' remains a common practice in the war-torn Islamic nation.
News of the girls' deaths emerged as officials said an Afghan couple who eloped to neighbouring Pakistan were being held in protective custody amid fears the bride's angry relatives will kill them.
Hewad, who is 22 and known by only one name, wed 18-year-old Mariyam Marjman in the town of Abbottabad, around 30 miles north of Islamabad, last month after escaping Kabul with the help of a Pakistani friend.
Marjman told officials a 'jirga', or assembly of her relatives, had travelled to Abbottabad to take her back to Afghanistan, where she would probably be murdered for marrying a person of her own choice.
'Mariyam declared that Hewad is her husband and both of them were in love before they got married,' senior local administration official Imtiaz Shah said, adding that the bride’s parents wanted her to marry her dead sister’s husband.
He said that the couple had brought the two-year-old daughter of Marjman’s dead sister with them to Pakistan.
The teenage bride has been moved to an orphanage with her niece, while her husband is at a prison in the northwest city of Mansehra.
The couple will appear at the high court in Peshawar on Monday, where officials will decide whether to hand them over to the bride's relatives.
Progress has been made on women’s rights since the Taliban were ousted, but many fear those gains are under threat as Nato troops leave and Kabul seeks peace with Islamist insurgents.
Earlier this month a video emerged appearing to show the Taliban's public execution of a woman accused of adultery in a village near Kabul.
The shocking footage, in which scores of men cheer as the executioner guns down the woman at close range, led to international condemnation after it surfaced in Afghan media.
The 22-year-old, named as Najiba, is shown crouching with her back to the gunman, who is thought to be her militant husband. She collapses after a few shots, but the man continues to fire.
She had been accused of having an affair with a Taliban commander.
Police believe the video was recorded on a mobile phone, in Parwan province, where security has deteriorated in the past two years.
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