A crime so heinous: Farm manager rapes woman seeking job

HARIPUR:

A manager of a dairy farm allegedly raped a woman seeking work, said the police on Sunday. Three people have been arrested so far and sent to jail by a magistrate.

Sadiqa Bibi*,32, a resident of Mohallah Hataran Hasan Abdal, said she went to Hattar Industrial Estate looking for work after she heard some units there were offering jobs to women. Sadiqa lost her husband a few months ago and is the mother of two underage children whom she was finding hard to provide for.

On Friday, she said, she reached the limits of the estate where a man standing on the roadside suggested she should apply for a job at a dairy farm run by a man called Imran. Sadiqa said the man helped her reach the establishment where she met Imran who first interviewed her and then asked her to accompany him to a Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) office
in Haripur.

According to Sadiqa, after sometime, they returned to the dairy farm where Imran with the help of his two employees Rasheed and Shahid locked her up in a room.

She said Imran raped her after which he and his accomplices tried to intimidate her into silence.  All three men threatened to kill her and then dump her body if she attempted to go public with the rape, said the mother of two.

Nonetheless, Sadiqa said, she managed to reach the station and lodged a complaint with the Hattar police.

The police arrested all three accused and filed an FIR under sections 376 and 506 of the Pakistan Penal Code. A one-day physical remand was obtained at the end of which the accused were produced before the area’s magistrate who sent the three men to Haripur jail. Sadiqa’s medical report had not been received by the police at the time this report was filed, however, officials said the examining doctor verbally confirmed that Sadiqa had been raped. *Name has been changed to protect identity

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2014.