Qari remanded in judicial custody in child pornography case

A court on Monday remanded a religious teacher in judicial custody in a case pertaining to the sexual harassment of his 13-year-old female student and the blackmailing of her family.

The suspect, namely Qari Abdul Qadeem, had been arrested over the complaint of a woman that he was sexually abusing her daughter and then blackmailing the mother into fulfilling his “unethical demands” with the teenager’s obscene pictures. Qadeem was presented before the District East judicial magistrate by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) after the suspect’s three-day physical remand that the agency had been granted expired.

The investigating officer of the case, namely Inspector Mumtaz Hussain, submitted a report in court saying that the interrogation of the suspect had been completed, following which the judge sent him to jail for two weeks.

On Saturday the court had remanded Qadeem in the custody of the FIA for three days on physical remand and ordered the IO to file a progress report.

The complaint against the suspect had been registered on December 29, following which a team of the FIA carried out a raid in Block 3 of the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighbourhood to arrest him, and found obscene pictures of the complainant’s minor daughter on his phone. The mother said that she had hired Qadeem to teach the Holy Quran to her daughter, who later complained that the teacher had been molesting her and had also taken obscene pictures of her.

The IO said that Qadeem had sent the obscene pictures of the girl to her mother on WhatsApp and threatened the family that he would circulate the photos on social media if his “unethical demands” were not met. The officer said that the mobile phone and the USB device recovered from the suspect had been technically analysed, on the basis of which the case had been established as an offence of child pornography.