“An announcement was made from the loudspeakers of the village mosque about my ‘conviction’. And all villagers were invited to a local state-run school to watch the flogging,” Saira recalled the incident.
“It was unbelievable. I rushed to the punishment spot to convince them of my innocence. But they refused to hear me. They flogged me 15 times, right in front of a crowd of villagers,” she said, breaking down in tears.
As if it was not humiliation enough, the next day they took her to another place in the village and whipped her again.
“I wanted to drop dead. I wanted to end my life. Because I couldn’t face local villagers,” she said of the trauma she suffered after the incident.
(Extract from Express tribune article)
A woman was wrongly accused by vengeful relatives of her in-laws of having an extra-marital affair with a man within her in-laws. Taliban vigilante announced her "conviction" from a mosque and invited villagers to come and watch the flogging. Many women face similar plights.
Saira, who is expectant now, says she is waiting for help from human rights organisations to start her life afresh.
If this is now how justice works, how can anyone rely on the law? The way these women have been stripped of their basic rights is alarming; what is more alarming, is that in our day and age, these crimes are still allowed to happen. Something has to be done; states should be secular, and should protect their citizens from religious extremism and pure pigheadedness and thirst for blood.
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