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Child bride still recovering from torture, being locked in basement toilet for months
An Afghan child bride who was tortured in an attempt to force her into prostitution is slowly recovering but is still hardly able to speak, hospital offices said.
Sahar Gul, 15 says she was tortured by her mother-in-law who locked her in a toilet in the basement of her husband's home for six months, beat her, pulled out her fingernails and burned her with cigarettes.
Sahar Gul, 15, is recovering in hospital in Kabul, her face bruised and swollen, her skin still bearing the marks of her ordeal, barely able to speak.
"Since the past few days, Gul can walk very slowly, she can eat and talk in a frail voice," said nurse Latifa Mirzad at the Wazir Akbar Khan hospital, as the bruised and battered girl looked on silently.
"She is hardly able to speak of her ordeal but sometimes she says in a weak voice 'my father in-law and mother-in law have beaten me'."
Police have said she was locked up when she defied her in-laws who tried to force her into prostitution. Her brother had sold her to her husband about seven months ago for $5,000.
"For several months I was locked up in a toilet by my in-laws and particularly my mother-in-law," she told media in a frail voice during a visit from Afghan health minister Dr Suraya Dalil. "I was denied food and water. I was tortured and beaten."
The minister said it was an example of "increased cases of violence against women in Afghanistan".
Gul's case was taken directly to President Hamid Karzai by a delegation from the Afghan Women's Network on Wednesday.
"The president assured his full support to strictly punish the perpetrators of the crime against Sahar Gul so that nobody can commit such a crime in the future," said the network's Lema Anwari.
Karzai pledged in a statement after the delegation's visit to take action against the "cowardly" perpetrators of violence against women.
The president said that he always took measures as soon as he heard about cases of violence against women, and would continue to take the issue seriously so that the culprits were brought to justice.
Women continue to suffer in Afghanistan despite billions of dollars of international aid which has poured into the country during the decade-long war.
A recent Oxfam study states 87 per cent of Afghan women report having experience physical, sexual or psychological violence or forced marriage.
According to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Com-mission logged 1,026 cases of violence against women in the second quarter of 2011 com-pared with 2,700 cases for the whole of 2010.
Dalil said Gul was suffering from severe blood loss, with multiple burns and injuries.
"She is also suffering from trauma and psychological problems," she said.
"She is still a child, below the legal age of marriage. She is only 15 and from a remote part of the country.
"It's a tragic and heartbreaking story for Afghanistan."
The teenager was found in a basement in the northeastern Baghlan province last week.
Her family, from the neighbouring province of Badakh-shan, had reported her disappearance to the police after being denied access to the home.
Three women including the girl's mother-in-law were arrested over the case, but her husband fled.
Gul's case comes after a woman known as Gulnaz was pardoned and released earlier in December after spending two years in prison for "moral crimes".
She was jailed after she reported to police that her cousin's husband had raped her. Gulnaz gave birth to the rapist's child in prison.
In November, the United Nations said that a landmark law aiming to protect women against violence in Afghanistan had been used to prosecute just over 100 cases since being enacted two years ago.
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