Four men convicted of murder were spared execution...

Four men convicted of murder were spared execution after a new agreement was reached with the victims' family giving them clemency. The four were to be executed on July 27 after previous arrangement that involved the forced marriages of eight girls, was scrapped following a national outcry.
Under the new plan, the four men will be released after their family pays the family of the two murder victims $130,000, said Rana Ijaz Ahmad, the law minister of Punjab province.
"The four convicted persons will not be hanged," he told The Associated Press. Ahmad and other officials went to Abbakhel, an area in remote rural central Pakistan, after media reports of the girls being forced to marry older men shocked many Pakistanis. The original deal, reached earlier last week, also required a payment of the same amount.
"We have just dropped the condition of getting eight girls," Abdullah Khan, a spokesman for victims' family, told The Associated Press after meeting with Ahmad. The four men's family will have to sell property and pool their resources to pay the sum, a king's ransom in this poor area.
The deal to spare the men the gallows was reached under Pakistan's Islamic law, which allows the family of a murder victim to ask for clemency. The two families were from the same village of Musakhen, in the Abbakhel area 140 miles southwest of Islamabad.
One of the eight girls that was to have been forced to marry, Wazeeran Khatoon, 18, said she agreed to wed a man her grandfather's age to spare her father, one of the four sentenced to hang for the murders fourteen years ago.
"I knew very well that I would be living with enemy's family," she said.
Forced marriages are not unusual in this remote region in Punjab, where central authority is weak and centuries-old traditions still often carry more weight than the law. Ahmad, the province's law minister, met with Khatoon. He promised her that the government will end forced marriages to protect the rights of women and children.
"We will enact new laws to prevent such marriages in the name of local customs," Ahmad said.