Jordan 'honour killings' cover for other crimes

AMMAN, Sept 6, 2008 (AFP)

When 18-year-old Maha decided that she wanted to quit her family's prostitution ring, her brother killed her and claimed it was to "cleanse" the family's honour.

Maha is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of women in Jordan and other conservative societies who rights groups say are killed every year by their male relatives in so-called honour crimes for "sullying" the reputation of their families.

The United Nations has reported such crimes in Brazil, Britain, Ecuador, India, Israel, Italy, Sweden and Uganda as well as in Muslim nations such as Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey.

Accurate figures on such killings are hard to come by because they often go unreported.

In Jordan, between 15 and 20 women are murdered annually in the name of "honour" and at least eight such killings have been reported so far this year, according to Jordanian authorities. Last year 17 such murders were recorded.

But the label "honour killings" can be misleading in this tiny kingdom's male-dominated society of about six million people.

Judges, lawyers, activists and experts agree that in most cases men exploit lenient laws and social misconceptions about women to murder them for inheritance, settling family feuds or to hide other crimes. "Maha did not want to continue to prostitute herself, so her brother killed her," Israa Tawalbeh, Jordan's first woman coroner, told AFP.