Lahore gang-rape of a five-year-old girl leads to outcry in Pakistan. PHOTO: FILE
Police still have no clue who carried out the attack despite detaining several suspects and releasing most of them after questioning, a law enforcement official said.
Police said the child was found outside a Lahore hospital at around 8:00 pm on Friday, a day after she went missing from a low-income neighbourhood in the city.
"Her condition is relatively stable but still she is in the intensive care unit," doctor Farzand Ali, medical superintendent at the Services Hospital, told AFP.
Senior police officer Zulfiqar Hameed said investigators had questioned several suspects but had yet to arrest anyone.
"We are investigating and we hope steady progress (is being made) but no one has yet been identified nor anyone formally arrested," Hameed told AFP.
Doctors earlier said the child was raped several times.
Rights campaigners and workers from NGOs on Saturday and Sunday staged protest rallies across Pakistan and demanded the arrest of the culprits, witnesses said.
Widespread outrage dominated social media while private TV channels prominently broadcast reports on the girl and her ordeal.
In April 2011, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of five men sentenced to death in Pakistan's most famous rape case, that of Mukhtar Mai.
Mai was gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council as punishment, after her brother, who was aged just 12 at the time, was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan.
A local court had sentenced six men to death, but a higher court acquitted five of them in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Khaliq, to life imprisonment.
In India, a judge on Friday sentenced to death four men convicted of the fatal gang rape of a student on a New Delhi bus last December, fulfilling the last wish of the 23-year-old victim who died of her injuries.
The December attack, in which the student was repeatedly raped and assaulted with a metal rod, sparked widespread anger at the treatment of women in India.
COMMENTS (9)
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its really very difficult to understand what causes a man to do rape but such persons should be punished according to Islamic rules n laws
I don't know whats going on. We are getting worse than animals. In today's paper, three minor girls raped in Peshawar. Now we are asking for GOD's wrath
why arent the people of Lahore going out into the streets to protest? They only did that during the elections because it was "cool" and concerned them!
This is what you get when you allow too many Bollywood movies. This clearly a sign of cultural invasion of Indians.
Maybe it's time to actually protest over something other than defending the blasphemy law? If not then maybe the land of the pure should change it's name.
All laws should be Islamic... now ask this poor child to bring three male witnesses.
is it legal in islam??
Every country has certain laws based which suit their population after following the international human rights and Pakistan should make laws and award punishment to these rapists, pedophiles so that this menace can be controlled before it is too late.