ISLAMABAD: Punjab Chief Minister Hamza Shahbaz Sharif visited the family of a minor girl who was allegedly gang-raped on a roadside this week near the central Pakistani city of Patoki, promising that investigators would deliver "immediate justice."
A police report filed at the Patoki police station on May 26 and seen by Arab News said the incident took place on May 25. The case has been reported by the uncle of the victim who was accompanying his brother and his brother's two children on a motorcycle from village Kani near Pattoki city to a village in Chunian where the family lives.
The group was stopped by two robbers along the route, who escorted them to a nursery on the road side, tied up the male relatives and gang-raped the girl at gunpoint. The robbers then fled with cash, mobile phones and the motorcycle.
The incident has revived memories of a widely reported assault in September 2020 when a woman was gang-raped beside a major highway in front of her two children, and led to new calls for tougher punishment for sexual crimes against women and children.
“I went to the house of the daughter who suffered from the inhumane incident at Chunian,” CM Sharif wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “I consoled them that it was my duty to provide them immediate justice.”
Shahbaz said his “heart is crying tears of blood” and the best police officers in Punjab were investigating the case.
“The suspects will soon be brought to justice,” he added.
Fewer than 3 percent of sexual assault or rape cases result in a conviction in Pakistan, according to the Karachi-based group War Against Rape.
The last government of Prime Minister Imran Khan passed an anti-rape criminal law in parliament last year. The law will create a national sex offenders register, protect the identity of victims and set up special fast-track courts to hear rape cases and reach a verdict within four months.