Pakistan: Cops probe killing of 18-year-old woman over social media photo

Police in Pakistan were investigating the killing of an 18-year-old woman who was hacked to death by the elders in her village as she and her friend appeared in a photograph on social media. According to the news agency Reuters, the woman was killed after the council of elders, known as jirga, ordered that she and her friend should be killed. The police said that some relatives of the victim were under suspicion.

Masood Khan, deputy superintendent of police in the Kolai-Palas district, said, "Some people had uploaded pictures of the two girls." Khan added, "They shot dead one of them while police rescued the second one."

The caretaker chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Syed Irshad Hussain Shah, said he had ordered police to arrest those responsible. Khan said an investigation was on, adding that male relatives of the 18-year-old were believed to be involved in the killing.

The second woman had been returned to her family after a judge investigated her safety, he said.

According to rights groups, hundreds of women in Pakistan are victims of honour killing, which is carried out by relatives professing to be acting in defence of a family's honour. These killings are often carried out in the country's deeply conservative rural areas.

Such killings are mostly carried out over perceived offences such as elopement, fraternisation with men outside marriage or other infractions of religious and cultural values on female modesty. 

(With inputs from agencies)