PAKISTAN. SIX PEOPLE FROM SAME FAMILY HANGED FOR MURDER

November 30, 2005: six men from the same family - Manzoor Ahmad, Mohammad Ilyas, Mohammad Ishaque, Javed Iqbal, Ghulam Mustafa and Anwar Hussain - were hanged in Pakistan for the 1989 killing of three men they believed had insulted some of their womenfolk.
"The six persons were hanged this morning at 6.30," said Ghulam Dastgir, superintendent of the district jail in the central city of Faisalabad.
The six, including Manzoor Ahmad, his son, brother and three other relatives, went to the gallows in two groups of three, Dastgir said. Their bodies were handed over to relatives, he said.
Ahmad and his five kin killed the three men from a rival family after they were believed to have made objectionable remarks to some of Ahmad's women relatives, prosecutors said. The two families had been involved in a feud for years.
Blood feuds are common in rural, conservative parts of predominantly Muslim Pakistan, where tribal codes of family honour still hold sway.
After killing the three men, the six danced around their bodies firing their rifles into the air in celebration, residents of Kurriwala village in Punjab province said after the June 3, 1989, killings.
The six were sentenced to death in 1991. Their appeals were rejected in 1995 and the Supreme Court upheld the sentences in 1999. They had failed to reach a compensation agreement with the murdered men's relatives, which, under Islamic law, could have saved them from the gallows. (Sources: Reuters, 30/11/2005)