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MANSEHRA: The religious scholars and police in District Kohistan have termed the recently emerged video scandal as baseless and told that no death decree was issued in the case. However, the brother of the accused men has sought help from the government once again, Geo News reported Saturday.

DSP Palas has completed initial investigation and told that both the tribes were unaware of the chaos created by the media. There was neither any evidence of the victims’ confinement nor of any death decree issuance.

Though the investigation has not completed yet, police force from the area has been called back. However, Mohammad Afzal, brother of the accused men, has again sought help from the government and said that police and clerics were trying to suppress the matter. The accused will be murdered as soon as the matter will be brushed aside, he said.

Police told on Monday that clerics sentenced four women and two men to death after mobile phone footage emerged of them enjoying themselves at a village wedding in the mountains of Kohistan district, 175 kilometres (110 miles) north of the capital Islamabad.

The men and women had allegedly danced and sung together in Gada village, in defiance of strict tribal customs that separate men and women at weddings.

Mohammad Afzal made public the entire episode and sought support to protect his brothers, who fled the village after being declared perverted by local elders.

But on Tuesday, District Police Officer (DPO) Kohistan Abdul Majeed Afridi said it appeared to be a case of tribal rivalry and an attempt to defame a family. He said the video was recorded three years ago and then edited in an attempt to implicate the party goers.

He said that the events stemmed from a dispute between two tribes and that there was no evidence that the men and women had been intermingling. “All of them were shown separately in the video. I’ve seen the video taken on a cell-phone. It shows four women singing and a man dancing in separate scenes and then another man sitting in a separate shot,” he said.

Police also arrested a cleric accused of sentencing six people to death.
"The cleric has said he had no role in the decree and his name was misused," local administration official Aqal Badshah Khattak told.

DPO Abdul Majeed Afridi along with Khattak told reporters that the matter about the decree issuance was concocted and was aimed at destroying the peaceful environment in the district.