Woman withdraws rape charges against judge

Says she made accusation fearing he would send her back to her family

HYDERABAD: The woman who accused Sehwan judicial magistrate Imtiaz Hussain Bhutto of rape withdrew the charges in court on Thursday.

"I feared that the judge will send me back to my family, owing to which I levelled the accusation," the woman told the court. She had claimed two months ago that the judge raped her in his judicial chamber, when she had appeared before him to record a statement about her free-will marriage.

The woman also distanced herself from the complaint filed on her behalf by the Sehwan police, claiming that the police obtained her signature on a plain paper. She maintained that she was not changing her statement under duress.

According to the woman's previous statement, the judge allegedly raped her in his chamber in Sehwan on January 13. The FIR was registered on the state's behalf at Sehwan police station.

The judge, however, had expressed a lack of trust in the Jamshoro police, which was conducting the investigation of the case, after which the home department transferred the case to the Hyderabad police.



Hyderabad SSP Adeel Hussain Chandio then assigned the inquiry to a team led by DSP Aurangzeb Abbassi. The judge had said that a Sehwan police official had a personal bone to pick with him, asserting that he had "invented the rape case allegation in connivance with the woman."

Over half a dozen hearings of the case were held in district and civil courts prior to Thursday.

The judge, in this duration, continued to avoid compliance with court orders to provide his samples for DNA testing, arguing that he did not trust the laboratories in Pakistan. He had requested the court to allow DNA testing from a lab in a foreign country.

Meanwhile, Sindh Human Rights Defenders convener Ali Palh, who is also a member of the Sindh Commission on the Status of Women, had filed an application under Section 493 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to become a party in the case on February 29. However, the application was dismissed.

Palh had claimed that the woman was facing threats and that she was hiding in a district in upper Sindh. He also said that DSP Abbassi had pleaded the court to cancel the judge's bail because he was not cooperating in the investigation.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 21^st, 2020.