A district court in Pakistan condemned a woman to death...

A district court in Pakistan condemned a woman to death by stoning in a public place for becoming pregnant whilst her husband served a life-term in jail.
Zafran Bibi said she had been repeatedly raped by her brother-in-law in 2000. The counsel for the woman, Sardar Ali, told Dawn that when Zafran told her father-in-law it, he took her to the police station where she was asked to sign a paper. Police did not record her statement, he said.
Later, she found out that her father-in-law, Zabita Khan, in an attempt to save his son, had named to the police an influential person from the town, Akmal, as the perpetrator. When Zafran lodged her case with the police she also underwent a medical examination, which found her to be seven-months pregnant. Following this she was charged with Zina under the Hudood Ordinance.
During her one-year trial, Zafran maintained that her daughter was the illegitimate child of her brother-in-law Jamal. Both Jamal and Akmal denied having relations with Zafran and were acquitted.
However the court accepted the police's claim that she had admitted to having an affair with her brother-in-law, and it was on the basis of this reported confession that she was found guilty. The case was heard under Sharia, or Islamic law, in the conservative town of Kohat in the North-West Frontier province.
Zafran now has seven days to appeal against her conviction in the federal Sharia court and can then go to the Supreme Court. A spokesman for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said it was very sad to hear such a sentence had been passed and they could only hope there would be a limit to such inhumanity.
Musarat Shafi, a member of the Aurat Foundation [a women's rights group], said the punishment awarded to the woman was too harsh especially considering her particular circumstances. As Zafran's husband was serving life imprisonment, she was at the mercy of her in-laws.
Musarat said Zafran was so helpless and poor that once she came to the foundation's office to ask for milk and food for her four children because her in-laws had refused to bear the expenses of her children in the absence of her husband.
Musarat appealed for Zafran's death sentence to be revised to life imprisonment as the child, her fifth, was completely dependent on her mother. The mother and brother of the convict, Shikara Bibi and Mohabat Khan, appealed to the Sharia Court to reverse the punishment as the convict was forcibly raped when her husband was not present at home and give an exemplary punishment to the real culprit.
Zafran's case is not the first instance a woman who has brought an accusation of rape has ended up being found guilty of adultery herself since Pakistan's Islamic laws were introduced during the 1980s. There have been a few cases in the past few decades when women have been sentenced to be stoned to death in this manner but none has been carried out.