Court denies bail to school owner in sexual assaults case

A sessions court has dismissed the application of the principal/owner of a private school seeking post-arrest bail in a case pertaining to sexually abusing several women and filming the crime to blackmail them.

On September 4, Irfan Ahmed was booked and arrested by the Steel Town police after some videos had gone viral on social media. He moved an application before the Additional District and Sessions Judge-V (Malir) through his lawyer, requesting the court to grant him post-arrest bail. 

The judge dismissed the application on the ground that the case was at a premature stage as no investigation report under the Section 173 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) had been filed yet, according to the defence counsel.

Meanwhile, another court granted post-arrest bail to the accused in a drugs case. He was told to furnish a surety of Rs50,000 to secure the bail. An FIR was registered against the accused under the sections 376 (punishment for rape), 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and 509 (insulting modesty or causing sexual harassment) of the Pakistan Penal Code, and Section 25 of the Telegraph Act at the Steel Town police station on behalf of the state through ASI Aftab Hussain.

Earlier, two women testified before a judicial magistrate that the accused had lured them by prospects of employment at his private school in Gulshan-e-Hadeed, sexually assaulted them and also recorded the heinous act in order to blackmail them.

The first victim deposed that she had visited the school around three months back for a job and the accused had instructed her to come after school hours for an interview. She said that when she went to the school again, he asked her to sit in his office, locked the doors and forcibly assaulted her.

“The accused committed the crime again when I visited the school after a week and when I attempted to resist, he slapped me and said that the act was recorded in the CCTV camera installed at his office and threatened to share the same on the internet,” the witness said.

The other woman said that when she came to know about the arrest of Ahmed through social media, she went to the police station to record her statement. She said the suspect had promised her job but never gave one, adding that during her first visit, he gave her Rs5,000 and shot her video calling her three to four times to his office.

In the FIR, the complainant police officer had stated that he was on patrol duty with his subordinates when he learnt about a video clip circulating on social media. The video showed a man subjecting different women to sexual abuse, he added.

He said the suspect was later identified as Irfan Ahmed, the owner of a private school in Gulshan-e-Hadeed. He also said the man was subsequently taken into custody, and a mobile phone was seized from him.

The police had claimed that there were around 45 victims whom the suspect had been blackmailing. On December 2, another suspect Ali Haider Lodhi was arrested after his pre-arrest bail was dismissed by the court in the present case.