Pakistan: A young Pakistani woman died on Tuesday after a rejected suitor set her ablaze for refusing his marriage proposal, a doctor said.

Sonia Bibi, 20, was admitted to hospital last month, where she told police that her former lover had doused her with petrol and set her alight after she turned down his proposal.

Medical staff had originally said she would recover, but a doctor in Multan’s Nishtar hospital told AFP news agency that Ms Bibi’s injuries had become infected and that she died on Tuesday morning.

About 45 to 50 per cent of her body had been burned in the attack, doctor Naheed Chaudhry, the head of the hospital’s burns department told AFP.

The incident took place in a remote village of Multan district in central Punjab province. Police have arrested a 24-year-old suspect.

Ms Bibi had told police that she had fallen out of love with her lover, and preliminary investigations suggested he had set her on fire ‘after she refused to marry him’.

Hundreds of women are murdered in Pakistan each year in cases of domestic violence or on the grounds of defending family ‘honour’.

The Aurat Foundation, a campaign group that works to improve the lives of women in Pakistan’s conservative and patriarchal society, says more than 3,000 women have been killed in such attacks since 2008.

Earlier this year, a 27-year old woman was beaten, kicked and burned to death in public in the Afghan capital Kabul], after she was apparently caught setting fire to a copy of the Koran.

Video footage shows the woman, identified only by her first name as Farkhunda, being lynched by a large group of men near the Shah-e Don Shamshira shrine and mosque in the centre of Kabul.

The woman’s parents said Farkhunda has been suffering from mental illness since she was 11.