'Missed by seconds': Investigator says media furor tipped off suspect in Pakistan rape case

LAHORE: A senior Pakistani investigator who is part of the team carrying out a manhunt for suspects in the recent gang rape of a mother said on Monday the main suspect in the case had escaped being caught during a police raid because media furor alerted him to police zeroing in.
Protests were held in several Pakistani cities over the weekend over the handling of the investigation into the gang rape of a mother traveling with her children on a highway last Tuesday, as police launched a manhunt for the suspects which they said they had identified through DNA tracing.
Punjab’s Inspector General of Police Inam Ghani said at a press conference on Saturday that police had used cell phone data to track 27-year-old suspect Abid Ali and carried out raids at a village near Punjab’s Sheikhupura district to arrest him.
Prior to the raid, local media channels began running Ali’s photos and other identification documents, which tipped him off and he fled, a senior official who is a part of the team leading the manhunt told Arab News.
“If the media had not run off with the news provided by the Punjab Forensic Science Agency about the suspect, we would have caught him,” the official, who requested anonymity, said. “We missed him by mere seconds.”
He also blamed the Punjab police for prematurely sharing the names and photos of the suspects with the media.
The IG’s office and the spokesperson for the Punjab police did not respond to multiple calls seeking comment for this piece. Shehzada Sultan, Deputy Inspector General Investigations, and Zeeshan Asghar, Senior Superintendent Police Investigation, who are on a six-member investigation team commissioned for the rape case, could also not be reached.
For his part, IG police Ghani has held the media responsible for “alerting” the suspect.
“Unfortunately, since this [information about the suspect] had come out in the public domain, the suspect knew we were getting close,” Ghani told reporters.
Police say the woman, believed to be in her thirties, was traveling from Lahore to Gujranwala, main cities in Pakistan’s populous Punjab province, on Tuesday night when her car ran out of fuel.
She phoned police for help, but before they arrived two men took her and her children out of the vehicle at gunpoint and raped her beside the highway.