Only 14 Bangladeshi Girl Charged With Adultery Was Lashed to Death
By Farid
Ahmed and Moni Basu, CNN
March 29, 2011 7:09 p.m. EDT
Darbesh Khan and his wife, Aklima Begum, had to watch
their youngest daughter being whipped until she dropped.
The eyes of the father are those of a heart broken man. We can see here though this man is Muslim,
despite the teachings of the Koran and Sharia Law, this is a man who greatly
loved and cared for his daughter. This is a man who did all he could lawfully
do to protect her. Despite his best
efforts on her behalf Islam and Sharia Law offer no such love, no such
compassion and no such protection for girls and women from evil men. This man and his whole family are victims of
the heartlessness, hatred, and evil that drives Islamic Sharia Law -- When the dust settled what he saw was his
daughter had become a bloody beaten and broken sacrifice to the God of Islam – The
blood thirsty and vengeful god – Moloch.
His precious 14 year old daughter was harassed by her forty-two year old cousin
before many witnesses. Who was seeking to force the 14 year old to marry him. As the story goes he was brought before the tribal
court, shamed, and fined $1000. Being
that this man was the younger brother, his older brother the cousins father leaned
on the girls father not to press for the collection of the fine.
A few months later after things finally calmed down, this older shamed Muslim
now harbored a burning hatred towards the 14 year old he once loved and lusted
after. Lying in wait in the darkness of
the bushes and family out house – no
sooner than she appeared to relieve herself he was on her stuffing a dirty rag
in her mouth so she could not cry out, the 14 year old, gagging her, beating her, and
raping her repeatedly. Sharia law
afforded this child no protection from her harasser, and when he struck again Sharia Law
killed her for having been beaten and raped by this evil Muslim man, while he
miraculously escaped punishment.
This story is always the same, only the names of the brutal men and their
female victims are different. This tale of injustice beatings torture rape and
the mutilation of girls and women happens over and
over and over every day in any Muslim nation, from the wealthy nation of
The people in these nations live under a cloud of fear, as there is no
escape from Islam and Sharia Law used to oppress and enslave all these nations
of people. If there was any real choice
in these nations many of these people would depart from Islam to either
Christianity or to live a non religious secular life.
In Islam and Sharia Law there is no escape – as they are commanded to hunt
down and slay all who depart their evil sadistic religion.
Her fellow villagers
in
Hena dropped after 70 lashes. Bloodied and bruised, she was
taken to hospital, where she died a week later.
Amazingly, an
initial autopsy report cited no injuries and deemed her death a suicide. Hena's family insisted her body be exhumed. They wanted the
world to know what really happened to their daughter.
Sharia:
illegal in
Hena's family hailed from rural Shariatpur,
crisscrossed by murky rivers that lend waters to rice paddies and lush
vegetable fields.
Hena was the youngest of five children born to Darbesh Khan, a day laborer, and his wife, Aklima Begum. They shared a hut made from corrugated tin
and decaying wood and led a simple life that was suddenly marred a year ago
with the return of Hena's cousin Mahbub
Khan.
It began as sexual harassment from a cousin
three times her age.
Mahbub Khan came back to Shariatpur
from a stint working in
The elders
admonished Mahbub Khan and ordered him to pay $1,000
in fines to Hena's family. But Mahbub
was Darbesh's older brother's son and Darbesh was asked to let the matter fade. (Through family pressure the father did not force
Mahbub the cousin to pay the fine)
Many months later on a winter night, as Hena's sister Alya told it, Hena was walking from her room to an outdoor toilet when Mahbub Khan gagged her with cloth, forced her behind nearby
shrubbery and beat and raped her.
Hena struggled to escape, Alya
told CNN. Mahbub Khan's wife heard Hena's muffled screams and when she found Hena with her husband, she dragged the teenage girl back to
her hut, beat her and trampled her on the floor.
The next day, the
village elders met to discuss the case at Mahbub
Khan's house, Alya said. The imam pronounced his fatwa. Khan and Hena
were found guilty of an illicit relationship. Her punishment under sharia or
Islamic law was 101 lashes; his 201.
Mahbub Khan managed to escape after the first few lashes. (His suspicious escape, when he was supposed
to be bound tight undoubtedly was a family fix, just like the fine. In Islam
and Sharia Law there are no family fixes for girls and women.)
Darbesh Khan and Aklima Begum had no
choice but to mind the imam's order. They watched as the whip broke the skin of
their youngest child and she fell unconscious to the ground.
"What happened
to Hena is unfortunate and we all have to be ashamed
that we couldn't save her life," said Sultana Kamal,
who heads the rights organization Ain o Shalish Kendro.
The Supreme Court
also outlawed fatwas a decade ago, but human rights
monitors have documented more than 500 cases of women in those 10 years who
were punished through a religious ruling. And few who have issued such rulings
have been charged.
The government needs to enact a specific law to deal with
such perpetrators responsible for extrajudicial penalty in the name of Islam.
--Sultana Kamal, head of rights organization Ain o Shalish Kendro.
Last month, the
court asked the government to explain what it had done to stop extrajudicial
penalty based on fatwa. It ordered the dissemination of information to all
mosques and madrassas, or religious
schools, that sharia is illegal in
"The government
needs to enact a specific law to deal with such perpetrators responsible for
extrajudicial penalty in the name of Islam," Kamal
told CNN.
The United Nations
estimates that almost half of Bangladeshi women suffer from domestic violence
and many also commonly endure rape, beatings, acid attacks and even death
because of the country's entrenched patriarchal system.
Hena might have quietly become another one of those
statistics had it not been for the outcry and media attention that followed her
death on January 31.
'Not even old enough to be married'
Monday, the doctors
responsible for Hena's first autopsy faced
prosecution for what a court called a "false post-mortem report to hide
the real cause of Hena's death."
Public outrage
sparked by that autopsy report prompted the high court to order the exhumation
of Hena's body in February. A second autopsy
performed at
Police are now conducting
an investigation and have arrested several people, including Mahbub Khan, in connection with Hena's
death.
"I've nothing
to demand but justice," said Darbesh Khan,
leading a reporter to the place where his daughter was abducted the night she
was raped.
He stood in silence
and took a deep breath. She wasn't even old enough to be married, he said,
testament to Hena's tenderness in a part of the world
where many girls are married before adulthood. "She was so small."
Hena's mother, Aklima, stared vacantly
as she spoke of her daughter's last hours. She could barely get out her words.
"She was innocent," Aklima said, recalling Hena's last words.
Police were guarding
Hena's family earlier this month. Darbesh
and Aklima feared reprisal for having spoken out
against the imam and the village elders.
They had meted out
the most severe punishment for their youngest daughter. They could put nothing
past them.
Journalist Farid Ahmed
reported from