A father’s pursuit of justice in daughter’s rape, murder case

KARACHI: A year ago, on this day (September 21), a 12-year-old girl was found hanging from the ceiling in her locked house in Korangi. Her postmortem examination revealed that she had been sexually assaulted before being asphyxiated.

From the girl’s father being suspected of involvement in her murder to the police now considering the possibility of suicide, the case has taken perplexing twists over the past year with investigators unable to make any significant headway in the case, leaving it shrouded in uncertainty and sorrow.

“After doctors disclosed that my daughter had been sexually abused before being murdered, we decided to keep her body in a mortuary, vowing not to proceed with her final rites until justice was served,” the victim’s father said while talking to The News.

“I was repeatedly called to the police station where I was made to wait for hours and subjected to interrogation and torture to extract the truth. My daughter, too, had to go through this harrowing experience at the police station. They even collected our blood samples for DNA profiling,” he continued.

This ordeal dragged on for three months until the investigating officer, DSP Nazneen Mughal, filed a report under Section 173 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) in a court, seeking disposal of the case under ‘A-class’.

An ‘A-class’ report means that the culprits are either unknown or could not be traced.

Being a poor labourer, he said, he managed to hire the services of a lawyer through one of his acquaintances to seek justice for her daughter, but the lawyer pointed out the challenges in pursuing the case without any leads or clues regarding the potential suspects in his daughter’s murder.

“How can I point fingers at anyone when I was away at work when the incident happened?” the father asked, adding that he could not afford to skip work to attend court hearings.

He remembers the judge questioning the IO during one hearing how a minor girl could take her own life.

On January 31, Judge Ilyas A Memon of the Gender-Based Violence Court (East) accepted the report with a direction to the IO to continue her manhunt for the culprits and submit a fortnight progress report.