KUNDUZ, AFGHANISTAN (BNO NEWS) -- Police in northern Afghanistan are looking for a man who allegedly choked his wife to death after she gave birth to a baby girl for the third time, according to media reports on Monday.

A police spokesman told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) news agency that 30-year-old Storay had been choked to death by her husband and mother-in-law after she gave birth to the couple's third girl late last year. "She was told by her husband that if she delivered another baby girl, he would kill her," the spokesman said.

The murder took place in a remote village in Khanabad district of Kunduz province, which is located in northern Afghanistan. Storay's mother-in-law has been arrested but her husband has fled, the police spokesman was quoted as saying by dpa. The report did not say when Storay was killed.

Despite the fall of the Taliban more than a decade ago, violence and abuse of women continues to be a serious problem in Afghanistan. Human rights activists have criticized Afghan authorities for their failure to protect women, and the issue was highlighted again by two recent cases.

In late December, police in northern Afghanistan rescued a 15-year-old girl who had been locked up in a toilet for about half a year and was frequently beaten for refusing to have sex with men brought home by her parents-in-law. The young victim had earlier married a 30-year-old man, a common practice in a country where some girls are being married as young as nine-years-old.

Prior to that, the Afghan government received a storm of criticism when a 21-year-old woman, identified only as Gulnaz, was arrested on charges of adultery when she reported that she had been raped by her cousin's husband in 2009. She initially did not report the sexual assault but was forced to do so after showing signs of pregnancy.

Refusing to marry her alleged attacker to have the case dropped, Gulnaz was sentenced to two years in prison on the charge of having sex outside of marriage because prosecutors argued they could not determine whether they had sex voluntarily outside of marriage or if she raped.

The initial sentence was later increased to twelve years in prison when Gulnaz appealed her conviction. Another appeal saw her sentence being reduced to three years imprisonment, but she received a pardon from President Hamid Karzai when the issue gained international attention.

The case of Gulnaz, who was released last month, drew international attention to the plight of many Afghan women after the European Union blocked a documentary which featured her story. The documentary, which shows cases of Afghan women jailed for so-called 'moral crimes', was blocked because of concerns for the safety of the women portrayed.

Human rights groups say hundreds of women in Afghan jails are victims of rape or domestic violence.

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