Pakistani woman dies after being set on fire by former lover

A young Pakistani woman died on Tuesday after a rejected suitor set her ablaze for refusing his marriage proposal, a doctor said.

Sonia Bibi, 20, was admitted to hospital last month, where she told police that her former lover had doused her with petrol and set her alight after she turned down his proposal.

Medical staff had originally said she would recover, but a doctor in Multan’s Nishtar hospital told AFP that Bibi’s injuries had become infected and that she died on Tuesday morning.

About 45 to 50 per cent of her body had been burned in the attack, doctor Naheed Chaudhry, the head of the hospital’s burns department told AFP.

The incident took place in a remote village of Multan district in central Punjab province. Police have arrested a 24-year-old suspect.

Bibi had told police that she had fallen out of love with her lover, and preliminary investigations suggested he had set her on fire “after she refused to marry him”.

Hundreds of women are murdered in Pakistan each year in cases of domestic violence or on the grounds of defending “family honour”.

The Aurat Foundation, a campaign group that works to improve the lives of women in Pakistan’s conservative and patriarchal society, says more than 3,000 women have been killed in such attacks since 2008.

Earlier this year, a 27-year old woman was beaten, kicked and burned to death in public in the Afghan capital Kabul, after she was apparently caught setting fire to a copy of the Koran.

Video footage shows the woman, identified only by her first name as Farkhunda, being lynched by a large group of men near the Shah-e Don Shamshira shrine and mosque in the centre of Kabul.

The woman’s parents said Farkhunda had been suffering from mental illness since she was 11.

Afghan woman stoned to death for ‘adultery’

A young Afghan woman was stoned to death after being accused of adultery, officials said Tuesday, a medieval punishment apparently recorded in a video that harks back to the dark days of Taliban rule.

The 30-second clip run in Afghan media shows a woman in a hole in the ground as turbaned men gather around and hurl stones at her with chilling nonchalance.

The woman, named by officials as Rokhsahana and aged between 19 and 21, is heard repeating the shahada, or Muslim profession of faith, her voice growing increasingly high-pitched as stones strike her with sickening thuds.

The killing took place about a week ago in a Taliban-controlled area just outside Firozkoh, the capital of central Ghor province, officials said, confirming the video which was sourced and released by international broadcaster Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

“Yes, the footage shown in the media is related to Rokhsahana, who was stoned to death,” a spokesman for Ghor’s Governor Seema Joyenda told AFP.

Rokhsahana was stoned by a gathering of “Taliban, local religious leaders and armed warlords,” Joyenda said.

Joyenda, one of only two female governors in Afghanistan, said Rokhsahana’s family had married her off against her will and that she was caught while eloping with another man her age — seen as tantamount to adultery.

The man was let off with a lashing, Joyenda’s spokesman said.

The brutal punishment meted out to Rokhsahana highlighted the endemic violence against women in Afghan society, despite reforms since the hardline Taliban regime fell in 2001.

— AFP