Honor Killings in the News: Karzai forced to investigate family honor killing

Skeletons come tumbling out of the Karzai family closet.

From Times Online:

When Afghan killers burst into a 12-year-old girl’s bedroom and shot her brother at close range it barely warranted an investigation.

Police said that no one reported the crime. Were it not that the pair were President Karzai’s cousins — and that the murder had all the hallmarks of a revenge killing connected to a Karzai dynasty feud — the shooting would in all likelihood have languished as little more than a footnote in Kandahar’s long catalogue of violence.

“The family didn’t report it so we couldn’t start an investigation,” police General Fazel Ahmed Sherzad, the head of security for Kandahar province, told The Times.

Revenge killings are enshrined as a noble and legitimate part of traditional Afghan culture, especially in Pashtun areas. Blood feuds can last for generations, according to the ancient pashtunwali honour code, and there is little state justice could, or would, do to interfere.

Mr Karzai said yesterday that he had personally ordered a police inquiry after details of the killing were reported in The New York Times.