From the Daily Telegraph:
PAKISTANI WOMEN BURIED ALIVE ‘FOR CHOOSING HUSBANDS’
A Pakistani politician has defended a decision to bury five women alive because they wanted to choose their own husbands.
Israr Ullah Zehri, who represents Baluchistan province, told a stunned parliament that northwestern tribesman had done nothing wrong in first shooting the women and then dumping them in a ditch.
“These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them,” he said.
“Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid.”
The women, three of whom were teenagers and whose “crime” was that they wished to choose who to marry, were still breathing as mud and stones were shovelled over their bodies, according to Human Rights Watch.
The three girls, thought to be aged between 16 and 18, were kidnapped by a group of men from their Umrani tribe and murdered in Baba Kot, a remote village in Jafferabad district….
Some accounts said that two older relatives had tried to intervene, but they too were shot and buried alive with the teenagers.
The Pakistanis, of course, have just ousted Musharraf — an actual liberal reformer who, for example, forced through changes in sharia-mandated laws which had made rape almost impossible to prosecute in Pakistan — so they could “restore democracy.” Their democratic “icon” is the late Benazir Bhutto, whose socialist Pakistan People’s Party proved endlessly corrupt in its last turn at the wheel (besides helping establish the Taliban in Afghanistan). So it is perhaps noteworthy that the Telegraph report on the murdered girls includes the following: “According to some reports, Baluchistan government vehicles were used to abduct the girls, and the killing was overseen by a tribal chief who is the brother of a provincial minister from the ruling Pakistan People’s Party.”