Two Pakistani women have been sentenced to death for murdering their religious school teacher who they accused of committing blasphemy, police said.
A district judge on Wednesday handed down the death penalty to two and a life sentence to one upon proving their involvement in the murder of Safoora Bibi in Dera Ismail Khan city in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in March 2022.
The pair sentenced to death are aged 23 and 24 while the one sentenced to life in jail is 16 years old, a local police official said.
Blasphemy is an incendiary charge in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where even unproven allegations of insulting Islam have provoked deadly vigilantism.
Police said the convicted women first injured their 18-year-old teacher with a stick at the gate of the school and later slit her throat.
They committed the murder after one of their classmates told them about a dream she saw in which the teacher had committed blasphemy, and that her killer “would be given the glad tidings of paradise,”.
The teacher’s uncle told the police he found his niece tortured and slaughtered in the street after he was informed of the incident. Police recovered knives and sticks from the accused when they were arrested.
