Six suspects held in minor girl’s rape case

Police say samples collected from suspects
for DNA testing; more raids under way

Six men suspected of raping a six-year-old girl, who was found near Malir River in Ibrahim Hyderi on January 19 and admitted to a hospital, were rounded up on Saturday.

DSP Quaidabad Irfan Zaman told The News that an investigation team of the Malir district police conducted raids in Korangi Sector-32A and its adjoining areas on late Friday night and detained six suspects.

He added that the suspects include the girl’s neighbours and criminals of the area.

The suspects were interrogated and the police also took samples from suspects for their DNA testing at a laboratory in Islamabad.

The DSP said the police had spoken with the girl’s family and the people who too took her to the hospital.

The girl’s parents have arrived in city from Larkana and work at a factory near Hub. They have five children.

The parents told the police that at around about 8:30am on January 19, the girl asked her mother for money and went outside to buy sweets.

The mother told her daughter to return early as she had to leave for work. But when she did not return by 9am, she told her elder daughter to find her sister.

Later, the girl’s mother was informed that a neighbour, Ibrahim, had left the girl home but she again went outside. Some neighbours said she was seen playing near a ground in the area before she went missing.

The DSP said the girl was found near bushes along Malir River by some trailer drivers who immediately covered her with a shawl and took her to a roadside stall where she was given tea.

Then they took her to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre. The doctors there referred her to the Civil Hospital Karachi where she is currently under treatment.

The DSP said more raids were under way to arrest the actual culprits.

A day earlier, Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar took suo moto notice of the rape and torture of the minor girl and sought a detailed report from Sindh police chief AD Khowaja within the next 48 hours.

According to the non-governmental War Against Rape’s (WAR) data on rape cases, 189 cases had been reported until the last week of December, with 64 cases at the Jinnah Post Medical Centre, 67 at the Civil Hospital Police Surgeon’s Office and 68 at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.

Earlier, WAR had identified localities of Korangi and Orangi as areas prone to sexual violence based on the number of cases from January 2015 to June 2016, with 616 cases reported at government hospitals with only FIRs accounted for just 24 per cent of the cases. During this time, 616 medico-legal examinations were carried out with 122 FIRs reported at 112 police stations.

Sheraz Ahmed, a programme officer at WAR, said that with the presence of only seven female medico-legal officers (MLOs) at hospitals, the survivors often hesitated in filing a formal complaint, because many a time the female MLOs were not present during their duty hours and given that tests were supposed to be carried out quickly, the delay affected evidence, creating hurdles in the case later.

Yet it is ironic to see the varying numbers between the data provided by AIGP Special Branch and offices of the city police chief because the former reported 1,128 cases while the latter reported 472 cases, with a stark difference of 51 per cent between 2005 and 2014.  However, out of the 30 cases taken up especially by WAR, seven concluded with success.