Burnt to death by men, laid to rest by women

24 March 2015 - 10:24 By ©The Daily Telegraph

A 28-year-old Afghan woman who was wrongly accused of burning the Koran was beaten with sticks, run over by a car, and burnt to death by men. On Sunday, she was laid to rest by women in an extraordinary funeral that drew hundreds on to the streets of Kabul.The vicious mob killing of Farkhunda, captured on video, shocked Afghanistan and created an international scandal for Ashraf Ghani, the country's president, who began his first state visit to Washington yesterday.At her graveside, General Mohammad Zahir, the head of the interior ministry's investigations department, said she had been entirely blameless."We have reviewed all the evidence and have been unable to find any single iota of evidence to support claims that she had burned a Koran," Zahir said.It was on Thursday that worshippers at the Shah-Do Shamshira shrine in downtown Kabul accused Farkhunda of burning the Koran.Instead, investigators have since said, she was burning a charm. Farkhunda's brother, Najibullah, said she was a devout Muslim who was a qari, a person who can recite the Koran according to the tajwid, or official rules of elocution.A former mathematics student at Kabul's Education university, she had enrolled in a madrasa and was waiting to start a course at Kabul university's Islamic studies school.But there was little that anyone could do as a righteous mob gathered to execute her. The video showed more than 500 young men attacking her.Her father, Mohammad Nadar, yesterday gave permission for women to carry his daughter's coffin. Traditionally it is men who carry the coffin and in some families women do not attend burials. He said mourners who escorted the coffin from the family's home to the cemetery were demanding that Afghan society change and that everyone who supported the killing be held to account."For the first time I saw visible anger at mullahs whose twisting of Islamic law has caused so much suffering in Afghanistan," he said.The mourners focused their anger on Mohammad Ayaz Niazi, the mullah of the Wazir Akbar Khan mosque. At his sermon ahead of Friday prayers, Niazi called for the release of the nine men who have been arrested so far."I am warning the government not to arrest those who did this, because it will mean an uprising," he said.When he arrived at the funeral yesterday, Niazi was driven out by angry mourners.Najibullah, her brother, said the family has only one request."We are a poor family, we do not have any connections. All I ask is that the perpetrators be brought to justice for their brutality," he said. "Nothing else."More protests are planned for this week over Farkhunda's killing...

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