‘Panchayat verdict’: Police fail to find discarded foetus

18-year-old allegedly raped on orders of a panchayat

GUJRAT: Police have failed to find the five-month-old foetus, constituting a crucial piece of evidence in solving the case involving a woman’s death, who was allegedly raped on orders of a panchayat.

Forensic experts said that it was vital to find the foetus for decisively determining the paternity of the stillborn child.

The woman, who reportedly torched herself, was brought to a hospital in Lahore where she gave birth to a stillborn girl. She had been pregnant for five months.

The girl’s foetus was reportedly either buried or disposed of somewhere in Lahore, but police have so far failed to locate it.

According to police, DNA tests were necessary to determine if the child was fathered by the alleged rapist, Muhammad Boota, or the baby was the offspring of the woman’s husband, Javed.

Rana Jamil Qaiser, the SHO of Saddar police station in Jalalpur Jattan, who is also the complainant in the case, said the manner in which the foetus was discarded could not be determined.

However, police have secured a piece of cloth in which the baby was wrapped at the time of birth.

Mystery surrounds the death of the 18-year-old pregnant woman, who was allegedly raped on the orders of a panchayat in retribution for an attempted sexual assault by her father. She is said to have set herself on fire last week.

The incident reportedly took place in Dhallo Gharbi village, where the victim’s father, Liaquat, a rickshaw driver, was held on charges of attempting to sexually assault a six-year-old girl in March this year.

Subsequently, a panchayat reportedly decided that the matter could be settled if the accused ‘agreed to hand over’ his daughter to Muhammad Boota, the assault victim’s father.

Later, Liaquat was released after the 18-year-old was allegedly raped by Boota. The woman, whose husband was abroad, got pregnant and later allegedly committ ed suicide when her husband came to know about the affair.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 14^th, 2016.