Sahiwal police nab four after minor girl’s forced marriage

Police have sent DNA samples to Punjab Forensic Lab for analysis

FAISALABAD: Police have arrested four people after a 14-year-old girl was allegedly married off on the order of a ‘panchayat’ in Chichawatni, Sahiwal.

The girl was married against her will to settle a dispute relating to a rape which was believed to have been committed by her brother. Saddar police sub-inspector Noor Muhammad told The Express Tribune that a resident of the district, Munir Ahmed, accused another person in the neighbourhood, Rafique Abbas, of assaulting his wife two weeks ago.



Ahmed, he added, asked the panchayat to summon Abbas’s family and marry his sister with him. The family was subsequently forced out of their house and the girl was forced to marry Ahmed. The officer maintained that samples of DNA have been sent to Punjab Forensic Lab for analysis to investigate the allegations.

Later, the girl’s brother Khizer Abbas complained to the police that his brother had wrongly been accused of the assault. According to him, his family members, including his elderly father, were falsely implicated in the case.

Police raided the village and arrested four persons, Munir Ahmad, Haq Nawaz, Muhammad Tariq, and panchayat member Sher Muhammad. The accused were booked under various provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and sent to jail on judicial remand.

While speaking to The Express Tribune, Khizer said the people levelling the accusations belonged to an influential family and had made up the whole story to forcibly marry his little sister.

He added the police also implicated his 70-year-old father and mother as collaborators in the ‘forced marriage’. “Not only this, the police have also nominated me and my other relatives in another case under Section 376 of the PPC on allegations of forcibly entering into the house of accused Munir along with my 15-year-old brother Rafique and allegedly committing rape with his wife at gunpoint.”



“We are not involved in any rape incident and the whole drama was staged just to marry my underage sister,” he said.

Khizer also blamed the police of exerting pressure on them to make a compromise deal with the accused. Interestingly, two FIR’s were registered by Chichawatni Saddar Police Station against Muhammad Rafique, Khizer Abbas, Javed and another unidentified accused.

The FIR had been registered on the basis of a complaint lodged by Munir’s mother Patani Bibi. She claimed that his son went to the city to bring medicines for her while his wife was alone in the house.

She alleged, “The accused forcibly entered the house and one of the accused, Rafique, took Munir’s wife into the room and sexually assaulted her.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 5^th, 2017.