Three men get 10 years each for minor’s rape

A district & sessions court on Thursday sentenced three men to a jail term of 10 years each after finding them guilty of subjecting a 12-year-old boy to sexual assault five years ago.

Convicting Zeeshan Ali, Saeed Nawab and Bilal for the offence, Additional District & Sessions Judge VIII Naveed Ahmed Soomro also ordered each of them to pay a fine of Rs20,000 to the state and Rs50,000 to the boy for causing him psychological trauma. If the convicts fail to pay the fine, they will serve another four months in prison.

According to the FIR, the three men had abducted the minor from a video game shop and taken him to a quarter in Shershah, where they raped him and also filmed the act to pressurise him into keeping quiet about his harrowing ordeal.

The complaint of the incident was lodged with the police three to four days later, after the boy found out that his tormenters had been arrested for a similar offence. The men, however, pleaded innocence and claimed that they had been falsely implicated in the case.

After conducting the trial, the judge observed that the prosecution had successfully established its case against the accused while the defence had failed to prove its clients were innocent.

The judge convicted all three of them under Section 377 (Unnatural offences) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and awarded each of them 10 years of rigorous imprisonment. He remarked that the court had taken a lenient view because of the young ages of the accused. The convicts were remanded back to jail, where they will serve the remaining time of their imprisonment, which is now less than five years.

The case had been registered under Section 367-A (Kidnapping or abducting in order to subject person to unnatural lust), 377 and 34 (Acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the PPC at the Shershah police station.