Police on Monday arrested the uncle of a girl who was allegedly shot dead by her father and uncle inside her home in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohistan region after her photos with a man went viral last month.
District Police Officer (DPO) Mukhtiar Tanoli said that the suspect was produced before a magistrate in Besham which handed him over to the police on a four-day remand. The father of the deceased girl was already in police custody, he added.
DPO Tanoli claimed that the girl was killed by her family after holding consultations among them.
The issue came to light when local media on November 24 reported that one of the two girls, whose images with a man went viral on social media, was allegedly murdered by her father and uncle on the orders of a local jirga in Kolai-Palas of KP.
There were reports that a second woman was also seen in viral photos with the same man and she had been handed over to her family by a local court.
Read: What we know so far about Kolai-Palas killing linked to viral photos
An FIR registered by the police said the initial report suggests that the pictures of two girls on Facebook went viral from the ID of a boy and the pictures of the women were also edited by Rehmat Shah and Aman Deedar.
Earlier, a similar case that took place in May 2012 in Palas Valley, Kohistan, involved the honour killing of up to five girls, of whom a video had emerged on the internet. The video featured a boy dancing while four girls clapped and sang along.
Kohistan is known for its tribal traditions and closely guarded secrets. A similar incident was reported here in 2012 when up to five girls were killed after their videos with local men went viral. The entire episode of the so-called honour killings was so secretive that a probe spanning several years could not determine how many girls were murdered. In 2018, there were claims that two of the five girls were alive.
