ISLAMABAD: The murder case of five Kohistan girls who figured in a video clip scandal of 2012 again came to limelight when a social activist, who was earlier made a member of a commission to investigate the case, sought an order from the Supreme Court on Saturday for verification of the identity of the victims.

Dr Farzana Bari, director of the Department of Gender Studies of the Quaid-i-Azam University, submitted a statement before the Supreme Court and requested an order for in-camera appearance of the girls before the court and before experts to verify their identity.

A three-judge bench, headed by Justice Ejaz Afzal Khan, is seized with the matter initiated on a suo motu notice by former chief justice Iftikhar Muham­mad Chaudhry when the controversy surfaced about the killing of the five girls on the orders of a jirga for dancing with boys at a wedding.

Dr Bari was made part of a three-member commission and she visited the area to inquire about the allegations of murder of the girls shown clapping in the video.

District and Sessions Judge Muneera Abbasi headed the commission and then MNA Bushra Gohar was also its member.

In the statement, Dr Bari said when the commission’s members visited the area, two girls had been produced before them to show that no girl had been murdered. “I had serious doubts and suspicions about the two girls produced before the commission as they did not appear to be the same shown in the video,” she said.

But, Dr Bari said, other members of the commission did not agree with her suspicions and she appended her dissenting note with the report of the commission, requesting the Supreme Court to involve Nadra for cross-matching the video images of the girls with the photographs which she had taken and provided to the court.

Dr Bari later petitioned before the Supreme Court for reopening of the case.

Explaining further, she said, three brothers of Afzal Kohistani, now a petitioner in the case, had also been murdered.

Moreover, Dr Bari said, local leaders had already held two press conferences in which they had admitted that the girls had been killed.

Published in Dawn October 23rd, 2016