In a story worthy of a Star Trek episode, five Pakistani girls were murdered for the crime of dancing with a boy, and then, when authorities came to investigate, they found the Pakistanis replaced with duplicates.  It didn't take a tricorder to figure out that while these were not robots or shapeshifters, neither were these the same girls, but rather close relatives of the murdered girls.

It was just a few seconds, a video clip of several young women laughing and clapping to music, dressed for a party or a wedding in orange headscarves and robes with floral patterns. Then a few more seconds of a young man dancing alone, apparently in the same room.

The cellphone video was made six years ago, in a village deep in Kohistan, a rugged area of northwest Pakistan. It was the last time the young women, known only as Bazeegha, Sareen Jan, Begum Jan, Amina and Shaheen, have ever been definitively seen alive.

 According to court filings and interviews with people who investigated it, the families confined the girls for weeks, threw boiling water and hot coals on them, then killed them and buried them somewhere in the Kohistan hills.

Later, when investigators appeared, relatives and community leaders insisted that the girls were still alive and produced a second set of similar-looking girls to prove it. 

The head of the local jirga, a Muslim cleric, allegedly issued a religious decree ordering the five girls to be killed for dishonoring their tribe, along with the boy seen dancing and every member of his family. There was no resistance from the community. After the girls were disposed of, several brothers of the boy were also caught and killed.

But two of the girls they produced were much younger than the victims, according to their official birth dates. A third could not be identified because both thumbs had been burned; her parents insisted that it was from a cooking accident. He concluded that at least two girls did not match the ones in the video and that the others were probably also imposters.

Questions for discussion:

1) Which is a bigger mystery: whether the girls were replaced with duplicates, or why Pakistanis and other Muslims murder their own children?

2) Can anyone tell me why we are still admitting students, visitors, and refugees from countries whose culture is a mishmash of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones?

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.