Three Pakistani Men Sentenced To Life In Prison In 'Honor Killing' Case

A court in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province has handed down life sentences to three men in connection with one of the country's most notorious "honor killing" cases.

The trio were sentenced over the 2012 murder of three women in the mountainous northern region of Kohistan.

The court in the town of Besham on September 5 acquitted five other men.

Those sentenced included a brother and the fathers of two of the slain women.

The killings occurred soon after a video emerged of the women singing and clapping to music at a wedding in the deeply religious and conservative region.

The clip also showed a man dancing, although he was never in the same shot as the women. A second man is said to have been filming.

The two men remain in hiding, while the fate of two other women in the video are unknown.

The public learnt of the video when the two men's brother, Afzal Kohistani, claimed that the women had been murdered after a tribal council ordered their executions for allegedly breaching the honor of the family.

Kohistani, 31, was shot dead in March in the city of Abbottabad, north of Islamabad.

Police arrested his nephew, Faizur Rahman, over the killing.

Hundreds of women are killed every year in Pakistan in honor killings for violating what Pakistani conservatives consider traditions on love, marriage, and public behavior.

Pakistan's parliament passed legislation against honor killings in 2016, introducing tough punishment and removing a loophole in the law that allowed killers to walk free if pardoned by family members.

Based on reporting by Dawn, AFP, and the BBC