Family of rape victim being threatened

LAHORE
FAMILY members of the late 18-year-old gang-rape victim Amina Bibi of Muzaffargarh district are continuing to face life threats from the accused party despite warning local police authorities of the alarming matter.
The young girl had set herself on fire in front of a police station in the district in March 2014, after failing to obtain justice. A court in Multan later acquitted the accused and his accomplices on grounds of insufficient evidence.
Talking to The News, the brother of Amina Bibi said over the course of the last few months his family home in Bait Mir Hazar Khan in Muzaffargarh had received visitors from the accused party, including the prime accused Nadir Hussain.
During these trips, the brother of the self-immolated gang-rape victim said, the accused party threatened him and his family members to refrain from appealing against the Multan District Court verdict which had acquitted the accused of all charges.
At one point, he informed The News that Hussain had opened fired on their house and left his mother badly injured. He said his family were not satisfied with the verdict and had intended to file an appeal. As per now, the family of the deceased has filed an appeal petition in the Multan Bench of the Lahore High Court despite life threats from Nadir Hussain and his accomplices.
‘I understand that we are a poor family with little chance of securing justice, especially as Hussain is influential and has sympathisers in local police, but we will continue to fight,’ the brother of victim told The News.
The victim’s lawyer Muhammad Abdul Qayyum told The News that the family had made multiple requests for security against these threats to Muzaffargarh police but to no avail. Several letters written by the family members, said Qayyum, had also been posted to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif informing him about the threats but no action had been taken. As the family lacks financial resources, Qayyum said, it was not possible for them to keep changing their location in view of the threats from the accused. He said he had also received threatening calls from the accused to avoid appealing the court decision. He claimed that after an inquiry into the rape incident ordered by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and undertaken by DPO Muzaffargarh Rai Zameer-ul-Haq, all police officers initially suspended by the CM were restored to their original posts.
Responding to claims of negligence, DPO Muzaffargarh Rai Zameer-ul-Haq told The News that the victim’s family was not receiving any such threats from the accused party and was only concocting stories to implicate Nadir Hussain. He said Amina Bibi had fabricated the entire incident of rape to implicate Hussain as her family owed a debt of Rs400,000 to his family. He denied taking the side of the accused in the case and insisted that local police were performing their duties to the best of their ability.
Earlier in March 2014, 18-year-old gang-rape victim Amina Bibi doused herself with petrol outside a police station after one of the suspects was released by the police. The girl was allegedly raped by Nadir Hussain and four other accomplices as she was walking back to home from college on January 5. She later yielded to injuries.
Following her untimely death, a large number of civil society protests were staged across the province with Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif suspending top police officials and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jilani taking suo motto notice of her self-immolation.