'Punishment' rape suspects held (3rd man arrested)

POLICE have arrested two more key suspects in the gang-rape of a Pakistani teenager ordered by a tribal council as a punishment, officials said.

Three of the four main suspects in the June 22 rape in Muzaffargarh are now in police custody, district police chief Farman Ali said. He said a hunt was on for one more suspect in the Punjab province.

Police were rebuked by a special bench of the Supreme Court last week for laxity in pursuing the offenders.

The court also criticised the police for taking more than a week to register the case, in which the tribal council ordered the teenager be raped as a punishment for an alleged affair between her 11-year-old brother and a 30-year-old woman from a tribe of higher status.

President Pervez Musharraf and Punjab governor Khalid Maqbool Ahmed gave the police deadlines this week to arrest the offenders.

Ali said a police officer, Mohammad Iqbal, had also been arrested for alleged negligence in the case and taking bribes from the girl's family to release her brother.

The boy had been arrested after members of the superior Mastoi tribe accused him of having an "illicit" affair with the woman from the tribe.

"The police officer is found to have been guilty of accepting an 11,000 rupee ($325) bribe to release the boy," another police officer said.

A tribal assembly, with no legal standing, held a hearing into the alleged affair last month and ordered that the boy's 18-year-old sister be gang-raped in punishment.

But the teenager told an inquiry team last week that the accusations against her brother were concocted by the Mastoi tribe after he threatened to tell his parents that three Mastoi men had sodomised him.

Mastoi women had "rejected a doctor's finding that he was a minor and incapable to meet the sexual lust of any opposite sex, and insisted that he is not minor", an inquiry team member said.

Police records, which were presented to the inquiry, showed that gang-rapes in Muzaffargarh were rampant.

The records documented the rapes of 22 women by 53 men in Muzaffargarh district last month alone.

Fourteen of the women, including the teenager whose case has left human rights groups in Pakistan aghast, were gang-raped, the records showed.

According to the Times of India, the second man who was arrested was one of the tribal court:

Tribal chief who ordered gang rape held
Times of India

ISLAMABAD: The village assembly chief who ordered gang-rape of an 18-year old girl shaming her family in Pakistan's Punjab province has been arrested after he made a bid to surrender.

Faiz Bakhsh arrived at a Urdu daily office in Multan city on Saturday night and identified himself after which he was handed over to the police by the newspaper staff.

Bakhsh claimed that he was against the verdict of the gang-rape given by the tribal assembly, seeking to justify his position from the contents of complaint lodged by the victim.

The girl from Meerwala village was attacked on June 22 after the council, with no legal standing, passed an order to rape her as a punishment for her brother's alleged affair with a woman from the next village.

The tribal assembly chief said that he had requested other Jirga members and the gathering of the Mastoi tribesmen to pardon her family as the boy's sister had already tendered apology for the act of her brother.

Anyone who is interested can send a letter to the editor of Dawn which is a Pakistani English Language paper located in Karachi Pakistan. The papers main URL is: http://www.dawn.com Then go to the letters page and at the bottom you will find the link to send the letter to the editor.

I did and here is my letter:

It seems to me that the most guilty parties in this whole sordid affair are the members of the tribal council who instigated all of this. They were the ones who ordered this. They also should be tried for this vile act. Because of their positions of authority and supposed wisdom they should be punished far more severely than then those who did the actual rape since they would have found others to carry out their decision if any of the group who actually raped the poor woman had refused. I don’t know what the penalty the Koran requires for a man who does this but that should be at the very least the council members punishment

If the woman commits suicide in the near future as a result of this barbaric act the members of that council and all others responsible should be held accountable for her death as murder. Their decision and enforcement of that decision will have killed her just as surely as if they’d taken a gun and shot her themselves. My guess is that nothing will happen to them and they will continue on their merry way and suffer no penalty not even a modicum of humiliation and shame that they poured by the truck load on this innocent girl.

This is an article from Dawn a Pakistani English Language paper in Karachi:

Gang-rape: CII seeks toughest punishment

ISLAMABAD, July 6: Terming the gang-rape incident at Meerwala shocking the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) said on Saturday that culprits of this heinous crime deserved severest punishment under the Hudood Ordinance.

"This is a shocking incident which has brought disgrace to the whole nation," said a press release issued here on Saturday.

The culprits of the gang-rape witnessed by a whole crowd, deserved the severest punishment under the Hudood Ordinance, the statement added.

The crime of culprits, abettors of the crime and Panchayat members was unprecedented and deserved severest punishment, the statement said, adding that the perpetrators had openly insulted the injunctions of the holy Quran and deserved an exemplary punishment under Islamic law.-APP

The URL is: http://www.dawn.com/2002/07/07 /top9.htm

The following is another article from that same paper:

Gang-rape: Jirga chief surrenders

By Nadeem Saeed

MULTAN, July 6: The head of the Jirga that had ordered the gang-rape of a woman at the Meerwala village late last month surrendered to the police at the offices of a local Urdu daily on Saturday.

Faiz Bakhsh arrived at the newspaper's offices at about 12:30pm. When he identified himself, the staff called the superintendent of police of Multan city. The police reached there at about 5:30pm.

Talking to reporters, Faiz Bakhsh claimed that he was against the verdict of the gang-rape. He pleaded that his position was also clear from the contents of the FIR lodged by the gang-rape victim.

Referring to the FIR, Faiz Bakhsh said that he had requested the other Jirga members and the gathering of the Mastoi tribesmen to pardon the Shakoor family as the boy's sister had already tendered apology 'for the act of her brother'.

He said the whole gathering was witness that he was weeping when Khaliq and others criminally assaulted the woman. Faiz Bakhsh further claimed that until the other day he was ignorant of the attention the gang-rape had drawn here and abroad because he left for Northern Areas the next day of the incident.

He alleged that the police had arrested five of his servants without their involvement at any level in the incident. He said that of the 11 men arrested, only he was a member of the Jirga and the rest had nothing to do with the case.

The DSP of Kotwali, Mirza Ramzan Beg, had come to the daily's offices to arrest Faiz Bakhsh.

The URL is: http://www.dawn.com/2002/07/07 /top8.htm

And one more:

AI asks CJ to ensure justice to rape victim

Bureau Report

PESHAWAR, July 6: The Amnesty International (AI), has in a letter to the Chief Justice of Pakistan, asked him to ensure that justice is done to a young woman gang-raped by a tribal council.

The Pakistani authorities must act to ensure that tribal councils cease to arrogate unlawful powers to themselves, says the letter. "Given the wide local participation, it must be assumed that local police was aware of the event as it unfolded, if not directly present during the incident," the AI said.

According to a press release issued here on Saturday, the organization said that after the 'judgment' was pronounced by the tribal council, the gang-rape was carried out by four men, including one member of the tribal council, in an adjacent hut while members of the Mastoi tribe reportedly stood outside and cheered. After the rape, the woman was driven naked through the streets of her village before hundreds of onlookers. Relatives of the girl were too frightened of retribution by the Mastoi tribe to approach police.

In the letter, the AI said that the local police only accepted a complaint by the woman's father seven days after the offence, when a delegation of lawyers met local police authorities and insisted on the registration of the complaint. As the perpetrators had fled, police arrested eight of their relatives to put pressure on the accused to surrender. On July 2, police arrested eight people, including members of the tribal council who had taken part in the 'trial' on charges of abetment of rape.

The Amnesty International welcomed the Supreme Court's interest in this case, and presented two other cases raised in previous reports, and requested the authorities to take urgent measures to bring perpetrators of these abuses to justice. The AI "has repeatedly urged the government to take such measures, but has yet to receive an official response."

"Tribal councils," said the AI, "have no legal standing, and the Pakistani authorities have failed to take adequate measures to prevent such bodies from taking the law into their own hands."

The URL for this one is: http://www.dawn.com/2002/07/07 /nat4.htm

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