Six Pakistanis were sentenced to death for dancing and singing at a wedding. The ill-fated wedding ceremony took place in the small mountain village of Gada, which is located in the Kohistan province of northern Pakistan.
Two men and four women were found guilty of debauchery. The verdict was imposed by local clerics - the leaders and elders of the clan. The reason for the accusation was a video made on a mobile phone by one of the guests. The recording shows the guests of the wedding celebration dancing and singing.
The fact is that according to strict community customs, men and women at a wedding should have fun in different places. Tough traditional beliefs became the reason for the final sentence for all six participants in the incident - the death penalty.
According to the media, there was no irrefutable evidence for such a harsh sentence. It is very difficult to judge from the available video whether the men and women were having fun together that evening or not. The video provided shows four women singing in the first episode and two men in the next episode, one of whom is dancing and the other just sitting. At the same time, it is not clear whether the singing and dancing were in the same place. In addition, there is reason to believe that the information about joint entertainment and the video is slander, the purpose of which was to defame the honor of the convicts. And the reason for this could be clan enmity.
For the inhabitants of Pakistan, where the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population are adherents of Islam, such incidents have long become the norm. The practice of karo-kari - killing in the name of honor - is especially common in the mountainous and rural areas of the country. Tribal laws allow both men and women to be killed, but the latter are most often the victims of such accusations.
In 2011 alone, 943 women were sentenced to death in Pakistan for defamatory honor and killed, 93 of them minors.
