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Afghan wife killed for bearing girl
Associated Press - January 31, 2012
It was the latest in a series of grisly examples of subjugation of women that have made headlines in Afghanistan in the past few months – including a 15-year-old tortured and forced into prostitution by in-laws and a female rape victim imprisoned for adultery.
The episodes have raised the question of what will happen to the push for women's rights in Afghanistan as the international presence in the country shrinks along with the military drawdown. NATO forces are scheduled to pull out by the end of 2014.
In the 10 years since the ouster of the Taliban, great strides have been made for women in Afghanistan, with many attending school, working in offices and even sometimes marching in protests. But abuse and repression of women are still common, particularly in rural areas, where women are still unlikely to set foot outside of the house without a burqa robe that covers them from head to toe.
The man in the latest case, Sher Mohammad, fled the Khanabad district in Kunduz province last week, about the time a neighbour found his 22-year-old wife dead in their house, said District Police Chief Sufi Habibullah. Medical examiners whom police brought to check the body said she had been strangled, Habibullah said.
The woman, named Estorai, had warned family members her husband had repeatedly reproached her for giving birth to a daughter rather than a son and had threatened to kill her if it happened again, said Provincial women's affairs chief Nadira Ghya, who travelled to Khanabad to deal with the case.
Estorai gave birth to her second daughter between two and three months ago, Ghya said. Officials did not have a family name for either Sher Mohammad or Estorai.
Police took the man's mother into custody because she appears to have collaborated in a plot to kill her daughter-in-law, Habibullah said.
Ghya, who visited the man's mother in jail, said that she swears that Estorai committed suicide by hanging. Police said they found no rope and no evidence of hanging from the woman's wounds.
Boy babies are traditionally prized much more highly than girls in Afghanistan, where a son means a breadwinner and a daughter is seen as a drain on the family until she is married off. Even so, a murder over the gender of a baby would be rare and shocking if proved true.
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