From AP, “Slaying of Afghan Women Concerns U.N.”
KABUL, Afghanistan “” The United Nations sounded an alarm for women’s rights in Afghanistan on Thursday after three young Afghan women were found raped, hanged and dumped on a roadside with a warning not to work for foreign relief organizations.
Women’s groups rallied in the capital to protest the killings, which came weeks after another woman was murdered for alleged adultery examples of brutality that appear to have survived the fall of the Taliban.
The bodies of the women were found Sunday in Baghlan province, 120 miles north of Kabul, and officials and doctors said they had been raped and hanged. A note found with the bodies said they were killed for working for international aid groups.
“While there is no confirmation that this was the case or the actual motive of the killing, this could constitute a threat to women working for non-governmental organizations, which (the U.N.) strongly condemns,” U.N. spokeswoman Ariane Quentier said…
Police arrested a woman and two men in the killings…
Officials said the note, which accused the women of prostitution, was signed by a previously unknown “Youth Movement.”
In the adultery case, authorities said Mohammed Aslam, a resident of a remote village in Badakhshan province killed his daughter Amina after she was caught in the house of a man other than her husband.
Officials say 13 people have been arrested in the case, including at least one mullah who allegedly sanctioned the killing of the 22-year-old woman.
A group of 26 Afghan women’s organizations staged a protest in a Kabul park Thursday to protest the killings and urge President Hamid Karzai to make sure authorities end “outdated customs and beliefs” behind decades of violence against women.