Couple and two children killed in suspected honour killing in Skardu

A married couple and two of their children have been killed in Skardu in what Dunya News described on Friday as a suspected honour killing, a report that gives no account of when the killings took place or who carried them out.

The outlet published the deaths as a headline item on Friday afternoon. It did not say where in the district the bodies were found, how old the two children were, who reported the deaths, or whether anyone has been arrested or named as a suspect. No police statement was carried in the report, and no official was named.

No other outlet the Skardu Times desk checked had carried an account of the killings by Friday evening, and no public statement from Gilgit-Baltistan Police on the case was available to this newspaper.

Because the only published account is a single report carrying no attributed official information, the basic circumstances of the deaths (the time, the place, the stated motive and the number of people involved) remain unconfirmed beyond the fact that four members of one family were killed.

Murder in the name of honour was placed on a separate footing by a 2016 amendment to the Pakistan Penal Code, which provides for death or life imprisonment for a killing committed in the name or on the pretext of honour. The same amendment removed the route by which families of victims could compound such cases.

Police in Skardu district have not released figures for how many such cases have been registered in Baltistan this year, and this newspaper has not obtained any district-level count.

Skardu Times will update this report when a police statement, a first information report or a family account becomes available. Readers should treat the motive given in the original report as an allegation by that outlet rather than an established finding; only a court can determine the character of a killing.