PESHAWAR: Two teenage girls were killed for honour allegedly by their cousin in Goryam area of North Waziristan tribal district after their ‘objectionable’ video footage with a man went viral on social media.

Official sources said the girls, aged around 16 and 18, were killed on Thursday and an FIR of the occurrence was registered at Razmak police station on Friday (May 15).

Police have charged the deceased girls’ male cousin, identified as Mahmood Aslam, as well as a man in the video named Umer Ayaz.

A police official at Razmak police station told Dawn on phone that the alleged killer Aslam had escaped and they had now been searching for him. He added that Ayaz was also incommunicado and apparently he had fled the area, apprehending threat to his life.

The official said that the video was prepared around a year ago by the suspect Ayaz when he had a meeting with the two girls, who were also accompanied by another of their female cousin on a roadside in the area.

He said that according to initial investigation the suspect Aslam had been residing in Karachi and he visited the area to kill Ayaz as well as the two girls. He said the third girl in the video was apparently spared as she was not sharing any intimate moment in the video.

The official added that Ayaz had filmed the objectionable video on a mobile phone of one of his friends and later on returned it back after deleting the video from it. He added that the said friend somehow managed to recover the video from phone memory and a few days ago the video started making rounds in the area on social media.

While Ayaz belongs to the area of occurrence, the girls’ family had shifted to North Waziristan during a military operation and started residing at Goryam.

Sources said that bodies of the girls were shifted to South Waziristan where they were laid to rest on Friday night.

Published in Dawn, May 17th, 2020