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"In 2001, at least 226 women in the southern province of Sindh were killed - usually by their husbands or brothers - while some 227 honour-related killings took place in the Punjab, according to the Human Rights Commission's annual report issued earlier this year.
`The real figures are likely to be higher,' says the Commission's Kamila Hyat, adding that figures were not compiled for Pakistan's other two provinces because of the sketchy nature of reports.
Academic Tahira Khan, who has spent five years studying honour killings, agrees that the trend is upwards, `not only in Pakistan...but all over the Muslim world where honour killings were occurring before.' At the heart of the killings are ingrained social and Muslim attitudes towards female sexuality, and changing attitudes of women in the rest of the world, she says.
New attitudes have led women to...