Family slaughtered in honour killings

Armed men stormed a house in an eastern Pakistan village today, killing a couple, their son and two relatives in an attack carried out to avenge family honour.

The eight attackers spared three others in the shooting in Vinnoi, about 20 miles east of Multan, said police official Jamil Ahmed.

The victims were 20-year-old Munawar Mai, her husband and one-year-old son, as well as her mother-in-law and a brother-in-law.

The attackers allegedly included four of Mai’s brothers who were angered by her decision in 2002 to break a family arranged engagement to her cousin and marry the man she loved, Ahmed said.

Human rights groups say hundreds of people, mostly women, are killed for honour in Pakistan’s deeply conservative rural areas, if they marry without family consent or are suspected of having affairs.