India woman raped and burnt alive

20 June 2011 Last updated at 09:01 GMT A woman has been gang raped and burnt alive in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, police say, the latest in a series of brutal but unrelated attacks on women there.

The woman's family says five men gang-raped her and then set her alight in her own home in Etah district.

In the past week there have been three violent attacks on women in the state.

Correspondents say Uttar Pradesh is one of India's most lawless states where women are accorded a very low status.

On Friday a 14-year-old girl was stabbed in the eye as she fought off two men who attempted to rape her.

The teenager was attacked in Gadwa Buzurg village in the Kannauj district of the northern state. She lost one eye and the other was also seriously damaged.

Police say the attackers were from her own village. Only one has been arrested so far and police said they were looking for the second man.

Two policemen in the area, who initially refused to lodge the parents' complaint, have been suspended.

Last week, a girl's body was found hanging from a tree on police premises in the Nighasan area of Lakhimpur district.

The girl's parents alleged that she was raped and murdered and that the police had offered them a bribe to keep quiet.

In the latest incident the woman, who was in her thirties, was sitting outside her home when five men dragged her inside the house and gang-raped her, according to her family.

Her family say the attackers sprinkled kerosene on her and set her on fire because the woman had recognised them and they were afraid of being caught.

The woman managed to give a statement to police but died shortly afterwards.

Police say they are are still looking for the attackers.

Earlier this year, the head of the National Commission for Women, Girija Vyas, said Uttar Pradesh was at the top of the list when it came to violent crimes against women.

State authorities have been criticised in recent years after several attacks on women and girls were reported.

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Plea for condemned Indian woman

16 June 2011 Last updated at 12:23 GMT Ms Kareem's family say that she was duped into carrying the drugs The family of a 64-year-old Indian woman sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia has appealed to the Indian government to help save her.

They say that Fazila Bee Abdul Kareem from Madras was tricked into taking the drugs to Malaysia by a corrupt employment agent in India.

She was convicted in May for trying to smuggle 2.9kg of the drug ketamine.

Ketamine is a hallucinogenic drug, used as an anaesthetic in medicine, which is often abused in the US and Europe.

Ms Kareem's family says that she went to Malaysia as a widow in search of work because she was short of cash after paying for the wedding of the last of her four daughters.

They say that because she had previously worked as a maid in the Gulf, her employment agent assured her of a similar job in Malaysia. She sold all her belongings to pay for the flight in February 2009.

At Madras airport the family say that she was handed a suitcase by the agent which she did not know contained the drugs.

The family have now reportedly approached the Tamil Nadu chief minister and the Madras city police commissioner and asked them to take measures to help her.

However the court in Malaysia described her defence as "ridiculous", pointing out that she entered the country on a tourist visa.

"If she want[ed] to work, she would have known where the work place was, the employer's name and would have had a work permit," the judge was quoted by the Borneo Post as saying.

"She also claims to be 64, but looking at her, she is older and it is unlikely there is someone who wants to employ her as a domestic maid.

"Her testimony is full of contradictions, not consistent, more of a fiction and an afterthought."

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Pakistan woman is 'paraded naked'

14 June 2011 Last updated at 14:01 GMT By M Ilyas Khan BBC News, Islamabad The incident is rare in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa - one of Pakistan's most conservative provinces Police in Pakistan say they have arrested two men for stripping a woman naked and parading her in a village.

One of the offenders had accused the woman's son of having illicit relations with his wife, the police said.

Public dishonouring of women is not uncommon in Pakistan and other parts of South Asia, but the incident is rare in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Police said villagers where the incident took place did not try to stop it because the offenders were armed.

Haripur district police chief Mohammad Ali Gandapur told the BBC that a resident of Nilor Bala village had complained to village elders that two men had had sexual relations with his wife.

According to the police, a village council advised the complainant to divorce his wife.

Instead, he and four armed men stormed the house belonging to the mother of one of the men alleged to have slept with his wife in order to kill her son.

Because the son was not there, the men dragged the mother out, stripped her and made her walk through the village, the police said.

They have now registered a case against seven people, but only two have been arrested so far. They say they are looking for other offenders.

Campaigners say achieving justice for women who are abused in Pakistan is difficult.

In 2002, Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped by members of a tribe in the village of Meerwala in Punjab province after her brother was accused of having sexual relations with a local woman.

Ms Mai launched legal proceedings against the alleged offenders. Six men were convicted but five were acquitted on appeal by the Pakistani Supreme Court in April.

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