ISLAMABAD, 7 July 2005 — Five men have been arrested for allegedly kidnapping and gang raping a woman in eastern Pakistan yesterday. The married woman was attacked because one of her cousins had an affair with a woman whose father disapproved of the relationship, police said yesterday.
“The accused say they carried out this horrible act as an act of honor,” said police official Mohammad Mumtaz.
The case is reminiscent of the gang rape of 33-year-old Mukhtaran Mai, who last week won a court appeal overturning the acquittals of 13 of her attackers after drawing international attention to her plight by speaking out.
Both cases involve a woman targeted for punishment for the actions of a male relative.
In the latest incident, the suspects kidnapped the woman, Fauzia Altaf, in the town of Chiniot in late June after the main suspect, Anwar Ali, got angry about an affair between her cousin and his daughter.
Ali was among the five men accused of raping and torturing the woman for two days. Two other suspects had absconded while one had turned himself in and been released on bail, Mumtaz said.
The suspects were arrested on Tuesday after police received a complaint from her family, he said.
“The woman has told us that she was kidnapped and raped by seven men last week,” he said.
Mumtaz said the lead suspect in the gang rape told police that his daughter was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by the youth, but that an initial police investigation showed that the woman willingly went with the young man to a nearby city last month.
Police plan to question the daughter and the young man to find out “the nature of their relations,” he said, adding that officers will “determine who is right and who is wrong” and “send this to a court soon.”
Mumtaz earlier said the lead suspect was the brother of the 17-year-old woman, but later clarified that he was her father.
Chaniot is about 250 km northwest of Multan, the main city in Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province.
