Reign of death

These loopholes need to be plugged. Police need to be persuaded that lives of women are not entirely dispensable.

Defects in laws and the manner in which society is structured allow people to get away with serial murder. The tragedy in a village near Kasur, where a milkman burnt to death his wife and four children as they slept, before committing suicide, could have been averted had he been penalised — or else treated for mental sickness — some 15 years ago, when he clubbed his stepmother to death. Instead, he was ‘forgiven’ by his father, and presumably under the Qisas and Diyat laws in operation in the country, got away by paying ‘blood money’. As so often happens in such cases, the money almost certainly never exchanged hands in actuality. Some seven years later, Shaukat Ali went on to poison his first wife. Again, he was never brought to justice, with the family reportedly hushing up the matter.

The latest killings are being attributed by police to an ‘honour’ motive. This would appear to be nothing more than a convenient excuse. It is unlikely that all the murders, spread over a period exceeding a decade and a half, were rooted in this factor. The case also highlights the many possibilities of abuse inherent in a law which, over the years, has been repeatedly used as a convenient way to kill off women and then escape punishment. The provision that allows the heir of the victim to seek either capital punishment or blood money means that when murder is committed within the family, the brother of the victim is often stated to be responsible, with his father — who is also the victim’s closest kin — opting to let him off.

These loopholes in the law need to be plugged. Police also need to be persuaded that the lives of women are not entirely dispensable and that cases of so-called ‘honour’ killings need to be examined in much greater depth. A failure to do so can only encourage other acts of killings, either by different perpetrators, or — as we have seen in the latest case — the same man opting to commit murder over and over again.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 16^th, 2011.