Crime and punishment: Three arrested in two sexual assault cases

Medical examination has confirmed that a 13-year-old girl in a Hafizabad village was raped.

SIALKOT/ HAFIZABAD:

Vanike Tarar police have arrested two men accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in Soyanwala village.

A medical examination at Hafizabad district headquarters (DHQ) hospital on Friday confirmed that the child had been raped. Police said DNA samples had now been sent to a laboratory.

A press release issued by the office of the district police officer stated that one of the suspects was a minibus driver who had found the child alone in Hafizabad and offered her a ride. It said the suspect and an accomplice had raped her and dumped her on a roadside near her village.

The press release stated that the child had been abandoned in Hafizabad by a man she eloped with.

“She had eloped with a neighbour…The man abandoned her in Hafizabad and returned to the village,” it said.

Complainant Muhammad Afzal*, the father of the child, had said in his application that his daughter had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted in the village. He had said the child, a domestic servant at the house of Hafizabad DHQ Medical Superintendent Dr Arshad Chatha, had been on her way to a school in the village to deliver lunch for Chatha’s children who studied there when she was forcibly taken away.

In another sexual assalt complaint in Sialkot district, Neekapura police have arrested a man accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting one of his tenants.

Talking to The Express Tribune at the police station on Friday, the suspect denied the charge and said he was wrongly implicated in the case because he had refused to give in to the complainant’s demand for money.

“She and her mother had asked me for Rs5 million. I refused to submit to their blackmailing that’s why they registered a case against me” he said.

The complainant had submitted in the FIR that she was kidnapped on turning down her landlord’s marriage proposal.

She said the landlord and an accomplice had detained her and sexually assaulted her for a month. She said she had finally escaped from the house where she had been held on Tuesday (August 28) and reported the matter to the police.

SHO Altaf Warraich said the suspect would be produced before a court on Saturday. He said a police team was looking for the other suspect.

A medical examination of the complainant was carried out at Sardar Beghum Hospital on Friday. The report will be available to the police on Saturday (today).

*Names have been change to protect victims’ identity

Published in The Express Tribune, September 1^st, 2012.