12 days on, minor girl’s rapist and murderer yet to be found

A seven-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Landhi on November 16, but despite the passage of almost a fortnight, police are yet to find the perpetrator of the heinous crime.

The girl was kidnapped, subjected to sexual assault and murdered the same day, but her body was found two days later at a vacant plot in the Muslimabad neighbourhood.

Following the discovery of the minor’s body, police conducted raids in the locality and detained a number of suspects. “We have sent DNA samples of 61 suspects for cross-matching. Results are expected on Thursday or Friday,” Quaidabad Station Investigation Officer (SIO) Arshad Awan told The News.

He said that all the detained men are locals, with a majority of them having a criminal record or a bad reputation. “We’re hoping that the culprit is among these 61 suspects whose DNA samples have been taken,” said SIO Awan. “If the culprit isn’t among them, we’ll focus on the neighbours who have gone missing. There are around four such men who have disappeared after the incident.”

Quaidabad Station House Officer Mohammad Ameen Khoso, Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) Muhammad Shafiq and ASI Pervez Iqbal are under suspicion as well. An inquiry against them has been initiated because they did not register the first information report (FIR) despite the victim’s family making multiple visits to the police station.

The family said that after the girl went missing, police did not register their complaint, and instead of trying to find her, they kept delaying the FIR registration for two days. It was the girl’s family who found her torture-marked body at a rubbish dump near an under-construction building.

The minor had been at her elder brother’s house to play on the fateful day. She went missing after leaving for home. Two days later, when her family found her body, the deceased was taken to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre.

The preliminary post-mortem examination report suggested that the child had been raped before she was strangled to death, while marks of torture were also found on her body, which was later handed over to the family for burial.

Following the discovery of her body, her family members and relatives held a protest and demanded that the government take steps to protect girls. The victim was third among six sisters. “We want justice,” said the girl’s father, a fruit vendor by profession, at the demonstration. “We want the killers to be hanged publicly to set an example for others.”