Tag: slavery

  • Five suspects granted bail in two honour killing cases

    Five suspects granted bail in two honour killing cases

    Peshawar High Court has granted bail in two separate cases involving honor killings.

    The first case involved Swat resident, Akhtar Ali, suspected of being involved in the killing of his wife and another man over three months ago.

    The bail was granted by Justice Shahid Khan of a single-member bench, who directed the submission of two surety bonds of Rs200,000 each for Ali’s release.

    The incident, which took place on July 22, 2023, was initially reported at the Shaheedan Wenai police station in Swat under sections 302 and 311 of the Pakistan Penal Code and Section 15 of the Arms Act.

    The complainant in the FIR, station house officer of the police station, Mohammad Zaib Khan, claimed that he along with a police team went to the crime site after learning about the murder of a man and a woman and found out that the deceased were killed by the petitioner, who suspected that the two had an extramarital affair

    During the hearing, the bench noted that the case lacked substantial evidence against Ali.

    It added that the complainant in the case had neither disclosed the name of the person who informed him about the involvement of the petitioner nor did he produce any other “cogent and reliable information, which could prima facie spoke about the guilt or otherwise of the petitioner.”

    Lawyers Saeed Khan, Askar Khan, and Dunya Zeb, representing the petitioner, emphasized the absence of witnesses and evidence connecting Ali to the crime.

    They added that the murders took place at nighttime and that there was no evidence to connect the petitioner with the commission of the offense.

    Similarly, the court also granted bail to Habib Khan and his three sons – Talim Khan, Owais Khan, and Zarif Khan – from Lower Dir district.

    It accepted the joint bail petition of suspects on the condition of furnishing two surety bonds of Rs100,000 each.

    They were arrested on suspicion of the honor killing of Habib’s daughter-in-law, Nish Bibi, whose body was found at their residence on Sept 23, 2023.

    An FIR was lodged by the mother of the girl, who alleged mistreatment and torture by her husband and in-laws.

    The complainant claimed that her daughter was married to Dawood six years ago but she didn’t have kids and she often asked her husband for medical treatment.

    She claimed that for the same reason, relations between the couple were strained and that she was mistreated by her husband and in-laws and was also tortured by them.

    Legal counsel Shabbir Khan Daulatkhel defended the petitioners, maintaining that the prosecution’s case was founded on rumors, lacking any concrete evidence against the accused.

    The initial bail application of the petitioners was rejected on Oct 12, 2023, by an additional sessions judge in the Chakdara area of Lower Dir district.

  • Pakistani family arrested for torturing daughter-in-law, forcing her to drink engine oil

    Pakistani family arrested for torturing daughter-in-law, forcing her to drink engine oil

    A Pakistani man and four of his family members in Britain have been sentenced to years in prison after forcing his wife to become a house slave, subjecting her to cruelty and torture from October 2017 to April 2019.

    The husband, Mohammed-Shuaib Arshid, brought his wife from Pakistan to the UK, after an arranged marriage, to their house in Hillingdon, West London, where he lived with his mother Nabila Shaheen, father Arshid Sadiq, brother Aqeel Arshid, and sister Zaib Arshid.

    According to court details, the woman was forbidden from leaving the house or attending college, and could not contact her family members back in Pakistan. Her personal identity documents were taken from her, leading her to begging her husband for purchasing basic toileteries as she had no cash of her own.

    The woman was subjected to torturous behavior by being forced to cook and clean around the house all day, and on one occasion was even forced to drink engine oil by the family. She was threatened with death by family members.

    The court said that during these two years, the woman was subjected to both mental and physical abuse at the hands of the five family members, leaving her with long term psychological trauma.

    According to Paul Jenkins, a senior district crown prosecutor for the CPS: “The victim believed that they were moving into a safe family home with a loving husband, but the subsequent actions of [the family] proved that this was not the case.

    “The victim was subject to regular abuse whilst under their care, resulting in serious physical and psychological harm.”

    A CPS spokesman spoke of the survivor’s plight: “Being the victim of violence or sexual assault is undoubtedly a harrowing experience – but when this abuse is ‘honour-based’, the challenges can often feel impossible to overcome.

    “If someone is seen to have dishonoured or brought shame on a family or community, they can be ‘punished’ through threatening behaviour, rape, kidnap, false imprisonment, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and even murder – also known as honour killings.”

    The husband Mohammed-Shuaib Arshid was jailed for 11 years; father Arshid Sadiq to seven years; mother Nabila Shaheen to four years; the siblings Aqeel and Zaib to 21 months each.

  • Edward Norton confirms Pocahontas is his 12th grandmother

    Edward Norton confirms Pocahontas is his 12th grandmother

    Edward Norton, who starred as the “genius” tech billionaire Miles Bron in the film ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ was a guest at the PBS genealogical history show ‘Finding Your Roots’ where the actor discovered that the real-life Pocahontas was his 12th grandmother.

    Pocohontas was a Native American who had welcomed English settlers into Virginia in the early 1600’s. Later, she was kidnapped and taken to England where she married tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614 and converted to Christianity. She died there.

    According to the host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, a paper trail directly led to connecting Norton to his 12th great grandmother Pocahontas and great- grandfather John Rolfe. He further revealed that Pocahontas had died around 1617, while Rolfe had passed away in March 1622.

    On this revelation, Norton had remarked that he was quite astonished.

    ‘It just makes you realize what a small … piece of the whole human story you are.’

    The show also revealed to Edward Norton that his third great-grandfather, John Winstead, owned a family of slaves, which included a 55 year old man, a 37 year old woman, and five young girls whose ages were between 4 and 10.

    To this, Norton confessed that he had researched his own history before coming on the show, and realizing that his family had owned slaves was something that was quite uncomfortable for him.

    ‘The short answer is these things are uncomfortable. And you should be uncomfortable with them. It’s not a judgment on you in your own life but it’s a judgment on the history of this country and it needs to be acknowledged first and foremost and then it needs to be contended with. When you read ‘Slave, age 8′, you just want to die.’

  • Saudi oil giant slammed for dressing migrant worker as a sanitiser

    Oil giant Saudi Aramco has come under fire after photos, showing one of its migrant workers wearing a surgical mask and a large hand-sanitiser dispenser, went viral on social media.

    Twitter users labelled the act by the oil company as “racist” and “classist” as the worker appeared to be walking around distributing sanitiser to staff members inside and outside one of its buildings in wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

    Following the backlash, the company released an official statement in which it expressed its “strong dissatisfaction with this abusive behaviour that was used to emphasise the importance of sanitization, without the approval of the company’s concerned party,” Al Jazeera reported.

    “The company immediately stopped this act and took strict measures to prevent it from happening again,” the statement said.

    However, Twitter users did not buy the company’s apology and demanded them to apologise to the “person himself” and not to the public.