KARACHI: A medical board on Monday declared a young Pakistani girl - who has said she eloped but whose parents say she was kidnapped from outside her Karachi home in April - to be aged 15-16 years, in a closely-watched case that has divided public opinion over which side was telling the truth.
The parents of Dua Zehra Kazmi, who had gone missing on April 16, say she is underage and was "kidnapped," but the girl told a Sindh High Court (SHC) judge last month she was not abducted and had married a man, Zaheer Ahmed, of her “free will.” The high court ruled on June 8 that Kazmi could decide her own fate and disposed of the case.
However, Kazmi's parents subsequently challenged the high court's verdict in the Supreme Court, which on June 25 ordered the formation of a new medical board to determine her age.
“The consensus opinion regarding the overall age of Ms. Dua Zehra d/o Syed Mehdi Kazmi is between fifteen to sixteen years nearer to fifteen years based on physical examination and dentition,” the medical board concluded in its report, a copy of which is available with Arab News.
The report, however, mentioned an "unusual discrepancy" in Kazmi's age on the basis of different examinations. It said she aged between 14 and 15 based on the physical examination, whereas the dentition evaluated on physical and OPG examination, a panoramic X-ray of the upper and lower jaws, including the teeth, suggested her age to be between 13 and 15. Her bone age, however, was between 16-17 years.
At the time of her disappearance, Kazmi resided with her family in Pakistan's Sindh province, where the Sindh Child Marriages Restraint Act, 2013 prohibits the marriage of a child under the age of 18 and provides penalties for a male contracting party, the person who solemnizes the marriage as well as the parent or guardian concerned.
But in Punjab, where Kazmi married Ahmed, the legal age of marriage is 16.
Jibran Nasir, the lawyer who represents Kazmi's family, told Arab News the trial court would take up the case on Wednesday, but he would move the superior courts as well.
“The medical report has established that the family had rightly been saying that their child was 14-year-old,” he said. "We will soon move the superior courts too."
While the laws determine the legal age of marriage in both provinces, they are silent on the validity of nikah (marriage contract) of underage spouses, according to legal experts.
In several cases over the last few years, the courts have separated underage couples and sent the girls to shelter homes but did not nullify the nikah.