Kohistan video scandal: JUI-F accuses MPA of concealing facts

Says investigation into deaths should be reopened.

KOHISTAN:

Questions have resurfaced over the alleged deaths of five women and two men who were shown in a video singing and clapping at a wedding function in May 2012.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl’s former lawmaker and religious leader Maulana Dildar Khan has accused a sitting MPA Maulana Asmatullah from the Palas tehsil of concealing facts and misleading a commission investigating the veracity of the video and the reported deaths. The scandal has claimed eight lives so far, with victims from both the Azadkhel and Salehkhel tribes.

Speaking to the media on Saturday evening Maulana Dildar Khan, who served as MPA between 2002 and 2008, said that Maulana Asmatullah had asked him to help hush up the deaths of five women featured in the video. “Since he is from the Azadkhel tribe, he asked me to use my political clout to help him and support the ANP government’s version of events as he could not go against his clan or bring a bad name to them,” Khan said. He added that he tried to convince Asmatullah not to conceal facts, but was told later that the fact-finding mission, ANP lawmakers and human rights activists had been ‘satisfied’.

In May 2012, Afzal Kohistani, a native of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohistan district said the local jirga had condemned five women of the Azadkhel tribe and two boys of the Salehkhel tribe to death for clapping and singing at a local wedding in March 2012. Such interaction between the sexes was said to go against the tribes’ customs. Kohistani claimed four women in the video and a teenage girl were killed on May 30. A fact-finding mission visited the area on June 4, following the Supreme Court’s suo motu notice of the incident, and reported that the women were alive. Maulvi Javed, head of the jirga, told the commission the women were alive and the case was disposed of. However, Kohistani and human rights activist Dr Farzana Bari, one of the three members of the commission formed by the SC, claimed that the jirga presented four similar-looking girls in order to convince the authorities that no deaths had taken place. Kohistani told The Express Tribune that his three brothers, Shah Faisal, Safi ud Din and Sher Wali, were killed by a dozen armed men from the Azadkhel tribe as they were involved in the video as well.

While he said that according to Maulana Asmat Ullah’s confession and information he had gleaned from the area, the women were killed in the name of tribal customs, Dildar Khan reiterated the need to send a second commission to the area and to verify photos of the women from the video against those provided by the jirga. He claimed he had not been contacted for a statement on the issue earlier and so thought it best to remain silent as he is a member of the same party as Asmat Ullah.

Maulana Asmat Ullah was not available for comment despite repeated attempts. Another JUI-F leader from Kohistan Maulana Karim Dad refused to comment on Dildar Khan’s statement, saying the matter was now two years old and he could not remember exactly what had happened. A political leader from the Pattan area, requesting anonymity, accused Maulana Dildar of using the incident to score political points. If Dildar Khan, who belongs to the Kishay Khel tribe of Pattan tehsil, knew about the case, he should have provided information to the commission or the media at the time, he said. The issue resurfaced in order to pressurise Maulana Asmatullah not to demand district headquarters in Palas in Lower Kohistan.

Dr Farzana Bari has also pushed for a reopening of the case, particularly in the wake of the alleged murder of Kohistani’s brothers.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2014.