Rights watchdog to resume probe into Kahuta child pornography case

Parents of the victim children had informed police about a gang demanding money for the objectionable material

The National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) will resume its hearing on Monday in a case relating to child sexual abuse and pornography committed by an organised gang of criminals in Kahuta, Punjab last month.

“The NCHR has initiated an inquiry on a petition filed by a lawyer and rights activist who had blamed police officers of laxity in the case,” a senior official of the commission told The Express Tribune.

“The petitioner also alleged that such an attitude on the part of police was intended to protect the accused persons who were being backed by influential people,” he added.

The case surfaced early August this year when parents of the victim children informed the police about a gang of over a dozen people in Kahuta who were involved in sexual abuse and pornography.



According to the complainant, the gang uploaded the objectionable videos of their children on the social media to force the parents to pay them heavy amount in return to delete the disturbing material.

Chairman NCHR, Justice (retd) Ali Nawaz Chohan accompanied by two members of the commission –Fazila Aliani and Muhammad Shafiq – would conduct the proceedings when the superintendent of legal department of police and the police prosecutor Rawalpindi would appear before them to record their statements.

The activist had informed the commission that police had not applied all the relevant laws while registering the case against the six nominated accused.

According to him, police registered the case under Section 377 of Pakistan Penal Code (applicable for an unnatural offence only), while it should have had added clauses against the offence of pornography.

During the previous hearing, a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) had informed the commission that it was a second such case in the area during the last over a year. The DSP also feared that few accused who were arrested in the previous case had been involved in the present case.



That became possible as the criminals obtained bail from a court within few months after their arrest.  Further, some other criminals may have joined them in the recent crime in Kahuta, the DSP said.

On April 18, an anti-terrorism court (ATC) sentenced two men to life imprisonment for sexually abusing minors in a series of crimes that came to be known as the Kasur child abuse scandal.

The scandal, which broke in the media in August 2015, revealed that a gang of over 25 criminals had sexually abused and filmed more than 280 minors, and had blackmailed the victims’ parents into paying hundreds of thousands of rupees by threatening to release the videos online.