A video of a public flogging of a girl, said to have occurred in Swat, Pakistan has caused a furor, while the facts surrounding the flogging are disputed.

The video shows two men holding down a female in a burkha as a bearded, black-turbaned man whips her 34 times.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan told the Guardian newspaper, “she came out of her house with another guy who was not her husband, so we must punish her. There are boundaries you cannot cross.” He told Adnkronos International, “it was not officially done by the Taliban but some Taliban did that in their private capacity,” adding, “some rules were ignored during the implementation of flogging like, it should be done behind closed doors and not in public.”

The person being flogged is said to be 17 years old, reportedly from Kala Kalay in Swat. But North West Frontier Province (NWFP) spokesman Mian Iftikhar Hussain said a girl who has been identified as the one in the video told officials she had not been flogged. Hussain added, “the incident depicted in the videotape never took place in Swat.”

The human rights activist who released the video, Samar Minallah, disagreed. She said she had received the video from a human rights activist in Swat, who had received it from local Taliban who disapproved of the flogging. Minallah added the girl had a Swat accent.

The date of the flogging is also disputed. NWFP spokesman Hussain said it occurred on January 3. The head of the Peshawar Bar Association said it occurred on March 7. The person who said he filmed it, Shaukat, said it took place within the past two weeks.

Shaukat said the Taliban punished the girl after she refused a marriage proposal. He told Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, “the man who proposed to marry her joined the ranks of the Taliban after the rejection and this was how he took his revenge.”

The BBC reported that “relatives of the man involved in the incident told the BBC he had gone to the house of the girl in the village of Kala Kalay to do repairs as an electrician, but militants accused him of having a relationship with her.”

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered a report on the incident within 15 days. Chief Justice Chaudhry said the “possibility cannot be ruled out that a fake TV material or a video had been prepared with an ulterior motive to malign [the] people of Swat.”