London, May 31: A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under ‘Sharia law’ after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine.
Katya Koren, 19, was found dead in a village in the Crimea region near her home.
Friends said she liked wearing fashionable clothes and had come seventh in a beauty contest.
Her battered body was buried in a forest and was found a week after she disappeared.
Police have opened a murder investigation and are looking into claims that three Muslim youths killed her, claiming her death was justified under Islam.
One of the three – named as 16-year-old Bihal Gaziev – is under arrest and told police that Katya had ‘violated the laws of Sharia’. Gaziev has said he has no regrets about her death.
Stoning is a divisive subject among Muslims, with some groups interpreting it as Islamic law and others disagreeing.
According to Amnesty International’s annual report on death sentences worldwide, issued in April, there were no reports of judicial executions carried out by stoning in 2010.
However, new death sentences by stoning were reportedly imposed in Iran, the Bauchi state of Nigeria and Pakistan.
At least 10 women and four men remained under sentence of death by stoning at the end of the year in Iran, where adultery is the only crime which carries that penalty under Sharia law.
It was widely imposed as a sentence in the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution, and even though Iran’s judiciary still regularly hands down such sentences, they are now often converted to other punishments.
–IANS–