2 Jordanian "honor killings" in a week

From the Jordan Times:

Criminal Prosecutor Amjad Kurdi on Saturday charged a 23-year-old man with the premeditated murder of his younger married sister for reasons related to family honour, official sources said.

Kurdi also charged the victim’s father, mother and sibling of complicity in premeditated murder in connection with the drowning of the 22-year-old at dawn on Saturday.

The victim, who was not identified by officials, was reportedly badly beaten by the suspects at her family’s home, then driven by her 22-year-old brother from Amman to the Dead Sea where he allegedly drowned her, according to the source.

The 23-year-old suspect, an electrician who got engaged a week before the murder, then placed his sister’s body in the trunk of the car, drove back to Amman, headed to the Jabal Hussein Police Station and informed officers on duty that he murdered his sister to “cleanse his family’s honour”, the source added.

The victim, who was married almost two weeks before the incident, was returned to her family home on Friday by her husband, who questioned “her fidelity”.

The victim’s family interrogated her and she allegedly told them that “she knew a man but was not involved in an affair with him” so they beat her until she almost fainted, the source told The Jordan Times.

The 23-year-old brother then told his sister he wanted to take her for a ride to calm things down, the source added.

“He drove her to the Dead Sea, and when the call for dawn prayers began, he asked her to recite verses of the Holy Koran, then dunked her head in the water until he made sure she was dead,” the source said.

The victim tried to resist and informed her brother that she did nothing wrong, but “he did not listen and killed her,” the source added.

A postmortem conducted on the victim indicated that she died of drowning and was tortured before she was murdered.

“Pathologists detected multiple bruises on different parts of her body caused by a wooden stick… the woman was beaten on the head, shoulders, legs and stomach,” the source said, adding that blood and tissue samples were sent to the criminal lab for further analysis.

The victim became the sixth woman to be killed in a so-called honour murder in Jordan since the beginning of the year. She is also the second to be killed during the past week.

Last Wednesday, a 22-year-old man reportedly shot his pregnant married sister three times in the head for reasons related to family honour.

Jordan had 17 known honor killings in 2007.