Arranged marriages are common in Pakistan and the consequences of refusing a husband picked for a woman by her family are severe. A 25-year-old woman was recently stoned to death by her family outside of a courtroom in Pakistan after she chose to marry the man she loved instead of one her family had chosen for her.
Stoning is common in Pakistan but still illegal. The brutality of this case has shocked everyone. Even worse, the woman was pregnant at the time and inevitably, her unborn child died during the incident as well.
The woman’s father, two brothers and a former fiancé threw bricks at her repeatedly and although she was taken to the hospital after the attack, she died shortly after the incident.
Although the woman was pregnant, the police are only charging the men who stoned the woman with one count of murder.
Police are searching for the people involved in the stoning and all of them escaped except the woman’s father.
Details about the events leading up to the stoning are unclear, but police believe that the woman’s family had registered a kidnapping case against the man she had planned to marry and she had come to court to argue that she was marrying him of her own free will.
After the family left the courtroom, the stoning occurred in the streets. There were many witnesses but no reports of anyone trying to stop the stoning from happening.
“This is a huge flaw in the law,” a police officer said. “We are really struggling on this issue.”
It is not known if the man that the woman had hoped to marry was present during the stoning but he publicly vowed to get justice for his lover and was devastated by the loss of the woman and his unborn child.
Image via Wikimedia Commons