Domestic violence: Tortured ‘for not conceiving a child’

Police arrest the suspect but say woman’s injuries are not serious enough to require prosecution.

MULTAN:

Sahuka police have arrested a man accused of torturing his wife, inflicting wounds on her body with a heated iron rod, for not conceiving a child since three years of their marriage.

However, the police have yet to register an FIR in the matter. SHO Mirza Jameel told The Express Tribune that the injuries suffered by the woman, 22, were too insignificant to require prosecution of the suspect. He said there were six categories of injuries and the ones the woman had suffered were the minor ones.

He said the woman was also mentally unfit so the police could not rely on her statements alone.

The SHO said he would still keep the suspect, Muhammad Asghar, in custody until a written complaint was received from the woman’s family that they don’t want to press charges against him.

Muhammad Hussain, father of the woman, said he did not plan to pardon the suspect. He said he had filed an application with the Sahuka police for the registration of an FIR.

The SHO, however, denied having received any complaint from him.

Talking to The Express Tribune, Burewala tehsil headquarters (THQ) hospital medical superintendent Dr Nasir Dilshad said the woman had 12 burn wounds on her body. He said she had also been burned with cigarettes. He said he had sent the medico-legal report to the police. “They should now decide whether or not to prosecute,” he said.

The MS rejected the police’s claim about the mental state of the woman. He said she was in a state of trauma but otherwise her mental abilities were intact.

He said she would remain under observation at the hospital for another three days.

Talking to The Tribune at the hospital, the woman said she was tricked by her husband into accompanying him to work on Sunday night to his landlord’s farm house in a neighbouring village where he tied her up and burned her with iron rods.

She was later dumped in a field where one of her relatives found her on Monday morning and took her to the Burewala THQ hospital.

She said her husband had said he was torturing her because she had failed to conceive a child in three years of their marriage.

Published In The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2012.