A woman and her daughter were allegedly forced into marching in a bazaar naked in Satiana.
The victims, a resident of Chak No. 74 GB, registered a complaint with the CPO of Faisalabad alleging that the accused, Amin, Nadeem and Shaukat, had broken into their house on March 14, “brutally tortured my mother ... and me and struck us with gun butts and grabbed us by the hair and dragged us out of the house and into the bazaar naked and had our house occupied”.
The CPO, Ghulam Mubashir Mekan, issued orders to the SP of Jaranwala to act on the complaint and arrest the accused.
The victim told the police that they had been having a property dispute with the accused, and the motive behind the accused attacking them was that very dispute.
The incident happened on March 14, and one wonders how a matter of such a heinous nature remained hushed up for so many days in an era in which even the minutest of traffic violations or other such matters get reported on the social media or other forums.
The victims said that they had contacted Satiana Police Station the very day they had been subjected to such a humiliation, but the perpetrators of the act, according to the victims, were so influential a people that Satiana police instead of registering a case indulged in delaying tactics and even attempted to make the victims reconcile with the accused.
The victims alleged that Satiana police did not take any action against the influential people who tortured them for 10 days.
They said that the alleged perpetrators of the crime had so much influence in their area that no one, even those who witnessed the incident in the bazaar, dared to report the matter anywhere.
The victim said that she had been left with no other option but to approach the CPO directly, and to do so she travelled over 40 kilometers to get to the CPO’s office.
Meanwhile, just a day after the matter came to the knowledge of the CPO of Faisalabad, Ghulam Mubashir Mekan, the SHO of Satiana Police Station, Sub-Inspector Abdul Jabbar, was removed from his post and ordered to report to the Police Line.
It is not clear whether SHO Abdul Jabbar was removed from his post due to this incident or something else.
In a harrowing incident in December last year, four women had been disrobed, tortured and paraded through a Faisalabad bazaar in broad daylight by a group of men who had accused them of shoplifting.
A First Information Report (FIR) had been registered at the Millat Town police station against four suspects -— Saddam, the owner of Usman Electric Store, and his employees, Faisal, Zaheer Anwar and Faqeer Hussain, the owner of a sanitary products' shop -— and 10 unidentified suspects on behalf of one of the victims.
The shocking assault was captured on disturbing video clips, which went viral and showed a group of men descend on women as they cry out for mercy. The horrifying footage showed the fearful women wearing nothing but a piece of cloth barely covering their body, as they walked through the streets.
The women, including one teenager, were seen in the viral video pleading to the people surrounding them to let them have a piece of cloth to cover themselves after being stripped, but they were beaten with sticks.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 26th, 2022.
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