AFGHAN police have arrested two men accused of beheading a teenage girl with a knife.
They are said to have killed the girl — aged 14 or 15 — after her father rejected a marriage proposal for his daughter.
The murder caused outrage even in the remote tribal areas where women are routinely subject to appalling treatment.
The girl was attacked while carrying water from a river to her village home in northern Kunduz province on Wednesday.
A police spokesman said: “The two men attacked her and slit her throat with a knife. They were arrested and are in police custody.”
An official added: “Our investigation shows those who killed her were people who wanted to marry her.
“People were harassing the family and asking for her hand. When she refused, they did this to her.”
Extreme violence against women and girls remains a major problem in the conservative Muslim nation more than a decade after Coalition troops brought down the notoriously brutal Taliban regime.
Earlier this month, four policemen were jailed for 16 years for raping a young woman in the same province.
Last month a 20-year-old woman was beheaded by her husband’s family in the western province of Herat after she refused to become a prostitute, police said.
Four people were arrested over the brutal killing.
And in September, five people were arrested over the public flogging of a 16-year-old girl for allegedly having an affair.
The girl was whipped 100 times in front of village elders and family members in central Ghazni province. Her alleged boyfriend was fined.