KARACHI: Pakistani Police said on Tuesday they had arrested a man suspected of killing a six-year-old Afghan girl in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Karachi, the third such case reported this month.

Child abuse and murder have been in the spotlight in Pakistan since the grisly rape and murder of Zainab Ansari, a seven-year-old whose body was recovered from a dumpster in the central town of Kasur in January 2018, unleashing nationwide protests. Ansari’s killing highlighted a series of pedophilia-related murders in her hometown and led to new laws in Pakistan, including introducing a penalty of life imprisonment for child abuse.

In the latest incident, a girl disappeared while she was out playing with other kids in the Afghan Basti, a refugee settlement located near Karachi’s Sohrab Goth neighborhood, on Monday evening. Police found her body inside an under-construction house near her residence. 

“We arrested Yousuf after neighbors said he was standing [there] when the children were playing and he took the girl with him toward a dark area,” local police officer Amin Qureshi told Arab News, identifying the 18-year-old suspect only by his first name.

Yousaf, also an Afghan refugee and the victim’s neighbor, had confessed during interrogation to killing the girl after sexually assaulting her. A case had been registered against him, Qureshi said.

This is the third case reported in December in which a girl child has been raped and murdered by someone known to her. On Thursday last week, a 14-year-old girl was strangled to death after being raped in the Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighborhood of Karachi. Police said the suspected killer had worked in the girls’ house as a plumber.

In another incident this month, a 12-year-old girl was raped and murdered in the Jacob Lines area of the city. Police said the suspect, Mujeebullah Nadeem, was the paternal uncle of the victim. 

In October, two men raped a minor girl whose family was displaced by devastating floods that hit Pakistan this summer.

At least 2,211 children were subjected to different forms of sexual and other abuse in Pakistan from January to June, Sahil, a non-profit organization working against child sexual abuse, revealed in its compilation of data from 88 national and regional newspapers this year. 

Fewer than three percent of sexual assault or rape cases result in a conviction in Pakistan, according to the Karachi-based advocacy group War Against Rape (WAR). 

Data compiled by WAR from Jan 2022 to July 2022 showed a total of 137 cases of sexual violence were registered with police in Karachi while 282 medico-legal examinations took place at three government hospitals, showing that only 49 percent of cases were reported to police.

WAR said it also investigated 42 cases of different forms of sexual violence during the first seven months of the year and found that only 15 – 36 percent – were taken to court for free legal aid and other holistic support. 

Out of the 42 cases investigated, 27 or 65 percent involved children under the age of 18 years, while the most vulnerable age group to sexual violence was children aged 5-11 years.