A mother and her four-year-old daughter were kidnapped and gang-raped for two weeks after attackers lured the woman with false promises of well-paid work at a hospital in Pakistan.
Police said on Tuesday November 10, that a man has been arrested with two other accomplices still wanted for the violent crime which took place in Kashmore, a district in Pakistan’s Sindh province.
Pakistani news network Samaa identified the suspect as Rafiq Malik, adding that police are questioning him over the attack after he was remanded in custody for three days.
The report said the woman who was a hospital worker from Karachi was persuaded to attend to someone after the suspects offered her a large sum of money for the work. After she agreed to the offer, the woman and her daughter were abducted by the group.
It was also reported that protests broke out after the lead investigator Umar Sheikh suggested the woman was to blame for the attack, saying she should have travelled on a busier road during the day.
Amnesty International released a message in support of protesters saying: ‘There have been too many victims and too few convictions of perpetrators in a criminal justice system characterised by impunity.’
It was reported that Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Human Rights Shireen Mazari tweeted: ‘For an officer to effectively blame a woman for being gang-raped by saying she should have taken the GT Road or question as to why she went out in the night with her children is unacceptable & have taken up this issue.
‘Nothing can ever rationalise the crime of rape. That’s it.’
In Pakistan, convicted rapists face a sentence of between 10 and 25 years in prison or the death penalty. For gang-rape, the punishment is the death penalty or life imprisonment.
Ojelabi, the publisher of Freelanews, is an award winning and professionally trained mass communicator and a recipient of the D9112 Superstar Icon Award, who writes ruthlessly about pop culture, religion, politics and entertainment.
