Her Name Was Khalida Chandio — and They Called Her Murder “Honour”

Her name was Khalida Chandio. She was around twenty years old, from a village in the Khairpur district of Sindh, in southern Pakistan.

Her parents later saw a video of her murder. It had been filmed as she was killed, and it circulated on social media about a week afterward — which is how much of the country, and her own family, came to see it. Her mother heard her daughter screaming as she died. “Her screams still echo in my ears,” she said.

Khalida had been declared kari — a word used to accuse a woman of an illicit relationship, and one routinely used to justify her killing. Police allege she was shot on the orders of a tribal council, and that among those who carried it out were her own grandfather and maternal uncle. They call this an honour killing. It is murder.

What Happened in Khairpur

The details, as reported by police and Pakistani media, follow a pattern that recurs across the country with grim regularity.

Declared “Kari”

Khalida was accused of having a relationship with a man — the accusation that, under a custom known as karo-kari, marks a woman for death. According to police, a local jirga, an informal tribal council with no legal authority to order anyone’s death, effectively condemned her. She was reportedly dragged before it and, by the following morning, she was dead.

A Killing Filmed, Then Shared

The murder was recorded. For roughly a week, it stayed hidden — the kind of case that, in many villages, simply disappears, with families threatened into silence and no one willing to come forward. Then the video surfaced online. The public outrage that followed is what forced the authorities to act. Police have since arrested a number of suspects — by some accounts around eighteen people — including close relatives of the victim. The case is now before the courts, and no one has yet been convicted.

The Word That Hides the Crime

The term “honour killing” does a quiet, terrible job: it dresses a murder in the language of tradition, and shifts the shame onto the victim rather than the killer.

Not Always About “Honour” at All

While many of these killings are framed around sex or relationships, researchers and rights groups note that the accusation is often a pretext. Sometimes it is used to seize a woman’s land or deny her an inheritance. Sometimes it is a weapon in a family or tribal dispute that has nothing to do with the woman at all. The label — kari, “dishonoured” — is applied, and it becomes a license to kill that a community will look away from.

The Scale of It

Khalida’s case drew attention because it was filmed. Most do not.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded at least 405 honour killings in 2024, the majority of the victims women. Figures cited for 2025 are higher still — on the order of 470 women — and every organization that tracks these deaths stresses the same caveat: the real number is almost certainly greater, because so many cases are buried, unreported, along with the women themselves.

Why It Continues

The most damning statistic is not how many women are killed, but how few killers answer for it. Analyses of gender-based violence in Pakistan have put the conviction rate for honour killings at around 0.5 percent. When a law exists but is enforced against fewer than one in a hundred perpetrators, it stops being a deterrent. Families are pressured into “forgiving” the murderer — often a relative — and the case dissolves. Women are killed, relatives are threatened into silence, cases disappear, and the men walk free.

Stop Calling It Honour

There is nothing honourable in a grandfather and an uncle shooting a twenty-year-old on the say-so of a council of men. It is violence used to control women — over their bodies, their choices, their land — and it persists because the systems meant to stop it so rarely do.

Her name was Khalida Chandio. Her mother still hears her screaming. The least the rest of us can do is call it what it was: murder.