MIRAMSHAH: The police on Monday arrested a resident for recording an ‘objectionable’ video, which led to the honour killing of two teenage girls.

District police officer Shafiullah Gandapur told reporters that Umer Ayaz had gone into hiding after the video went viral on social media and was held during a special police operation.

The girls, aged 16 and 18, were killed in Garyam area here on May 14, while the bodies were secretly shifted to their native area in South Waziristan tribal district for burial.

The Razmak police registered an FIR next day against the suspected killer and a cousin of the deceased, Mahmood Aslam, and Umer Ayaz.

The DPO said the police had taken four relatives of the girls into custody and were interrogating them.

A police official told Dawn that another woman seen in the video was the wife of the suspected killer and that she was ‘spared’ by the killer as she wasn’t seen do anything objectionable in the video.

He said the suspected killer lived in Karachi and had come to the area to kill the girls and Umer Ayaz.

The official said the police were interrogating Umer Ayaz to learn about the events, which led to the targeted killings, especially about whose mobile phone was used to record the ‘objectionable’ video and how it leaked before going viral on the social media.

About the postmortem of the girls, he said as the bodies were shifted to South Waziristan tribal district in a secret manner and were buried there, postmortem wasn’t performed.

The official said Umer Ayaz had filmed the video on the mobile phone of one of his friends and returned it after deleting the video from it.

He added that the suspect’s that friend managed to recover the video from the phone’s memory before the video did rounds on social media.

The killings of girls have caused a public outcry on social media with different individuals and organisations demanding the early arrest and punishment of the culprits.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2020