MULTAN: Two men have been arrested for allegedly bludgeoning their sister and her lover to death with bricks in a Pakistani village, a gruesome slaying that one of the suspects said was carried out to “restore family honour”, police said Thursday. In another village, police detained six men accused of abducting and raping a teenage girl after one of their female relatives eloped with a man from the victim’s family. Police officers found the bodies of Ilahi Seen (45) and her lover in a house in the village of Donga Bonga in eastern Punjab province, after villagers reported hearing cries, said Ghulam Murtaza, head of the village police station. The woman’s brothers attacked the couple when they were together in her room after midnight on Monday, said Murtaza, adding that the victims had been hit repeatedly over the head with bricks. He said the floor and walls of the room, in the house where the woman lived with her brothers, were spattered with blood.
One of the men in police custody said that they saw the couple in a “wrong situation” and attacked them, said Murtaza. “We hit them until they became cold,” Murtaza quoted one of the suspects, Maqbool Ahmed, as saying. “We know our homes have been ruined, but we have done nothing wrong. We poor people only have our honour to protect,” Ahmed was quoted as saying. Murtaza said police had filed a murder case against Ahmed and his brother Mohammed Aslam.
Meanwhile, the suspected rape took place earlier this week in the village of Habib Labano in Sindh. About a dozen men allegedly kidnapped a 16-year-old girl, raped her and sent her home with her clothes torn open, said local police officer Irfan Farooqi. He said that six of the 12 suspects identified by the girl’s father had been arrested. He said that police were still searching for the others and were awaiting the results of a medical examination to confirm whether the girl was assaulted. The alleged abductors told the girl to tell her family that they had “taken revenge for our honour,” Farooqi quoted the girl as saying.