Afghan mother killed allegedly for not bearing son. When will the abuse end!!!

I was so angry when I read this and I will never respect Islam and any other religion that abuses their females so badly. What is so sad is that the males apparently don't know in this case, that the male determines the sex of the baby not the female. When will these people come into the 21st century? BBB

Afghan mother killed allegedly for not bearing son
Graham Bowley, New York Times
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

FILE - In this Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011 file photo, an Afghan woman carries her sick child to the emergency room at Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. An Afghan woman has been strangled to death, apparently by her husband, who was upset that she gave birth to a second daughter rather than the son he wanted, police said Monday. It was the latest in a series of grisly examples of subjugation of women that have made headlines in Afghanistan in the past few months including a 15-year-old tortured and forced into prostitution by in-laws and a female rape victim who was imprisoned for adultery.

Kabul --

The young Afghan woman gave birth to a third girl three months ago - to a husband, the authorities say, who had been demanding a boy.

Last week, the man and his mother, in the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, put a rope around the woman's neck and strangled her, the police said.

The body of the woman, known only as Storai, 22, was found by the police a few hours later in her room, and she was buried a day later, on Thursday.

Storai's death was a chilling reminder of the low status of women in Afghanistan.

Also unsettling was the revelation that the husband, identified as Sher Mohammad, 30, was suspected of being a member of a local militia that, the police and government officials said, has proliferated in the region and stoked lawlessness and violence, including in the home.

According to the police, Storai was married four years ago, when she was 18, and had two other girls: a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old.

But in the months after the birth of Storai's third daughter, her husband and mother-in-law nagged her and argued with her about having borne yet another girl, said Nadera Geya, head of the Directorate of Women's Affairs in Kunduz.

After Storai's death in Mafali, a village in the Khanabad district in southeast Kunduz, the mother-in-law put a rope in the window of her daughter-in-law's room to give the impression that she had killed herself, Geya said. But there were signs of torture that led to suspicions that Storai had been killed, Geya said.

"Her mother-in-law strangled her with a rope and said she committed suicide herself, which is not true," she said. "They killed her because they did not want her to bear any more girls. They had disputes with her even before this."

Sayed Sarwar Hussaini, a spokesman for the Kunduz chief of police, said the mother-in-law, Wali Hazrata, had been arrested but Mohammad, the husband, had fled.

Hazrata is in police custody in Kunduz city. She has denied that she and her son killed Storai or that her son was a member of one of the militias known as arbakai, the police spokesman said.

Kunduz is no stranger to domestic violence. In December, four gunmen, also believed to be arbakai members, broke into a house and threw acid on three school-age girls and their mother in revenge after an attacker's offer of marriage to one of the girls, 18, was rejected by her father.

Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs shelters for abused women, said while she had seen cases in which women were bullied by their husbands through pregnancy, and sometimes a husband even took a second or third wife if the first wife continued to have girls, killing was unusual.

"Girls are looked down upon in Afghanistan," Naderi said. "I have heard of many cases where the wife is threatened with violence and beaten up, but I have never heard of a woman being killed for having a girl."

The police said Mohammad was now being protected in Khanabad by a local arbakai commander called Qaderak.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/30/MN7K1N0JOR.DTL#ixzz1l3cNgLX0