Pakistan police say probing new evidence in case of four women 'stripped' and tortured

KARACHI: Police in Pakistan’s Faisalabad district said on Wednesday they were investigating new evidence in a case in which four women were allegedly stripped before being tortured, saying authorities were examining CCTV footage and mobile videos to ascertain the truth of the case.
Five men were arrested on Monday and Tuesday on charges of assaulting a group of women, stripping them naked and filming them in a marketplace in Faisalabad. Mobile phone videos of the incident were widely shared on social media and showed the naked women being manhandled outside a shop as a large crowd watched. 
According to an initial police report, the women went to the area to collect garbage on Monday at around 10:30am. When they entered one of the stores in the market and asked for water, the shop owner accused them of trying to commit robbery. The women said they were subsequently beaten up, stripped, then dragged out on the road as people made their videos "in naked condition," the police report said. 
New CCTV footage that emerged after the filing of the police report showed the women stripping themselves.
Imran Mehmood, Faisalabad’s regional police officer, urged people to stop "victim blaming" after the emergence of the new videos, saying no conclusion could be drawn just by looking at CCTV footage.
“We will see if the women stripped themselves naked on their own or someone forced them to do it since the footage has no sound. We will examine all the video clips together to get to the bottom of the incident,” he told Arab News, adding: “People should avoid victim blaming before the relevant authorities reach a conclusion.”
Mehmood said his department was investigating the case on merit.
“At the moment, there are three well established facts,” he said. “The first crime which the arrested individuals committed was illegal confinement of these women, second was mishandling, and third was torturing them.”
The police official said neither the shopkeepers nor anyone among the crowd had called the police to report the case, which was their primary responsibility.
“When all of this was happening, no one bothered to stop it or inform the police,” he said. “We took action after we found out about the incident through our social media team.”
New CCTV footage, he added, would only determine the application of Section 354-A of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) that deals with “assault or use of criminal force against woman and stripping her of her clothes.”
Such acts are punishable by death or imprisonment for life along with financial penalty.
According to the police complaint, a copy of which is available with Arab News, the suspects have been charged under sections 354-A (assault or use of criminal force against a woman and stripping her), 509 (insulting modesty or causing sexual harassment), 147 (punishment for rioting) and 149 (unlawful assembly guilty of an offence committed in prosecution of common object) of the PPC.