A Pakistani man and woman were tied to a tree and stoned to death on suspicion of committing adultery. Hundreds of people are killed every year in predominantly Muslim Pakistan, most of them women in rural communities, after being deemed to have dishonoured their families. Police said they had arrested two people over the killing of the man and woman at the weekend in a village in Punjab province. "The man and woman were relatives and were stoned to death by their relatives," senior police officer Zafar Bokhari told Reuters by telephone from the central city of Multan.

Sara Jaffar Nimat is an 11-year-old girl from the town of Khanaqin in Iraqi Kurdistan. She was murdered on the 3 August 2007. The painful, degrading and horrific killing of Sara is another outrageous crime against young girls and women in Kurdistan. Sara was only in fifth grade at school. Loved by her friends, they played together on the night she was killed. Sara’s body was found in a nearby empty building. It had been hit by bricks, stones, and then burnt. There is not much information yet about who committed such a barbaric crime against an innocent young girl.

“Du’a Khalil Aswad was a 17-year old Yazidi (a non-Muslim Kurdish minority) girl in Iraq who was stoned to death because members of her community believed she had run off to marry a Sunni Muslim man. A number of people in the crowd filmed the brutal death on their mobile phones, and the footage was later posted on the Internet. Aswad was a member of the Yazidi religious sect, which bans marriage outside of faith.