The brother of Afzal Kohistani, the man who exposed the 2012 Kohistan video scandal and was killed last month, has demanded the formation of a judicial commission to investigate the murder of his brother.
“Our whole family [lives in] fear today,” he said, adding that he had gone to Islamabad just three times in the past 10 years because of this fear. Afzal was shot dead on Mar 6 in the densely populated area of Sarban Chowk at around 8:10pm by unidentified gunmen who managed to flee afterwards.
Bin Yasir, Kohistani’s brother, while speaking to reporters at Peshawar Press Club on Wednesday, said that Afzal had been trying for years to change an outdated system and its customs, for which he had been killed.
Bin Yasir’s three other brothers, Shah Faisal, Sher Wali and Rafiuddin, were also killed inside their house in January 2013. He said the family wanted the case to reach its logical conclusion as four of his brothers had already been killed.
According to witnesses, he was shot multiple times and died on the spot, while three passersby were also injured. Station House Officer Ghafoor of the Cantt police station had said that Afzal was accompanied by his nephew, Faizur Rehman, who had reportedly also shot back at the gunmen.
“Police do not even have the weapon used for his murder,” Yasir said, adding that the family does not have faith in the local police.
He alleged that the police were trying to implicate his nephew in the murder of Afzal in an attempt to spoil the case. Following Afzal’s death, police booked his nephew.
As an investigation was launched, Abbottabad police arrested Fazlur Rehman, confiscated his pistol and registered an FIR against him for allegedly murdering Afzal and injuring the passersby.
The development had infuriated Afzal’s family member, who objected to the registration of the case against Rehman and staged a protest outside Abbottabad’s Cantt police station.
Social worker Qamar Naseem also addressed the press conference and said that the courts had been misled in the Kohistan video scandal for seven years. Naseem alleged that the women presented before the commission which was sent to Kohistan to ascertain the identity of the women were not the ones seen in the 2012 video.
Naseem alleged that local police, including the SHO, had paid people off in the Afzal murder case.
“This [case] should be given to the crime branch so that justice can be provided,” Naseem urged, pointing out that no lawyer was ready to take it up and that members of civil society were also being given threats.
The scandal
The Kohistan video scandal made headlines in 2012 when five girls were killed by members of their tribe after a mobile phone video of them at a wedding in a remote village in Kohistan emerged on social media.
The video showed the five females singing and clapping along as two male family members danced. The mixed gathering had taken place in a village located in an extremely conservative part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In the eyes of the locals, the youngsters had violated tribal norms and brought dishonour upon them.
After the video was leaked, a jirga was held by the girls’ tribe which decreed the killing of the girls and the boys under ‘riwaj’ (a tribal custom).
Afzal, the brother of one of the boys in the video, was the one who made the news public, alleging that the girls had been killed on May 30, 2012, on the orders of a cleric who led a 40-50 member tribal jirga. Officials in the area, however, had claimed that the murders did not take place and the girls were alive. Former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhary had taken a suo motu notice of the case on June 7, 2012, and constituted a fact-finding mission on July 17 the same year to investigate the case.
