Loophole halts justice for honor killing victims in Jordan
Jordan has seen a surge in "honor" killings of women, with nine recorded this year already.
AMMAN, Jordan — Batool Haddad, a Christian girl from the northern Jordanian village of Khirbet Wahadneh, kept relatively quiet about her interest in Islam, mentioning it probably only to her sister, who also kept it to herself.
But when Haddad converted to Islam after attending a lecture by a Saudi preacher, according to local reports, she told her sister, who this time told their father, who told his brother. On April 30, the two men took Haddad to a local forest.
Beating her first with a stick, they then used a 40-by-50-centimeter (15-by-20-inch) rock, fracturing and crushing her skull and killing her, said Ali Shotar, the forensic pathologist who examined her body. She was about 22 years old.
Haddad was one of four women killed last week in Jordan in a shocking succession of unrelated murders that has highlighted one of Jordan's more taboo topics: so-called honor crimes. Three of the deaths occurred within a span of 24 hours, from April 30 to May 1, and all of the killers were relatives of the victims.
