Four men were charged with gang-raping a woman on the...

Four men were charged with gang-raping a woman on the orders of a traditional village jury in a case that sparked outrage across Pakistan.
Shackled in handcuffs and chained together, the four emerged from the back of a police van with their co-accused and were led into the courtroom in the regional centre of Dera Ghazi Khan.
On the opening day of the trial, 10 other men were charged with involvement in the case, while a policeman accused of negligence may be tried in a separate court, prosecution lawyers said.
Abdul Khaliq, Ghulam Farid, Faiz Mohammad and Allah Ditta, aged between 20 and 40, face the death penalty if convicted, but deny the charges against them.
"This is a case of 'hang them first, try them later'," one defence lawyer said outside the court. "There was not a single eyewitness to the rape."
The defence team also challenged medical evidence presented in court, saying tests on the woman were taken too long after the date she said she was raped to be accurate.
Mukhtaran Mai, a 30-year-old divorcee, says she was repeatedly raped after approaching the tribal council in Meerwala to settle a dispute between two families at the opposite ends of the village's social scale.
The juries, called panchayats, are often convened in rural areas to settle local disputes in which women often end up as pawns to village elders.
Mai, from the poorer Gujar family, says she pleaded with the men of the more powerful Mastoi clan to free her brother, kidnapped after they accused him of having an illicit affair with a Mastoi woman. Teenager Abdul Shakur denied the accusation, but that did not prevent three Mastoi men from sodomising him, according to the Gujar family.
To save the honour of the Mastoi clan, Shakur was expected to wed the woman with whom he was linked while Mai was to be given away in marriage to a Mastoi man.She begged the council for mercy, but instead was given a far worse punishment - four men raped her and made her walk home semi-naked in front of hundreds of people, the prosecution said.
"This incident was shocking for people in general," the government prosecutor in the case, Ramzan Khalid Joiya, said.