Foreign woman allegedly gang-raped records statement before Lahore magistrate

LAHORE: A foreign woman who was allegedly gang-raped recorded her statement under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure before a judicial magistrate at the Cantonment Courts on Monday.

The 20-year-old Azeri woman had traveled to Pakistan for business purposes and was allegedly gang-raped by three men in a rented flat of a private housing society located near Raiwind on the night between Friday and Saturday.

It was the second such case in which a foreign woman was reportedly gang-raped in the Defence C police station area during the last four months.

The woman was brought to the court under tight security to record her statement before Judicial Magistrate Muhammad Sagheer. Before the proceedings began, the magistrate ordered all unrelated persons to leave the courtroom.

The statement continued for more than an hour.

The Defence C police had registered a case against three unidentified suspects on the woman’s complaint.

On Sunday, Lahore police requested federal authorities to place the names of the three prime suspects in the case on the Provisional National Identification List (PNIL), saying they had fled Lahore shortly after the alleged assault.

A police official said the location of one of the suspects had been traced to Sialkot. Police also took two close relatives and a domestic servant of one of the suspects into custody.

DIG Operations Faisal Kamran said all three suspects had been identified and police teams were working to arrest them. He said the case was being investigated jointly by the Crime Control Department (CCD), operations and investigation wings. The vehicle allegedly used in the incident had also been taken into custody, he added.

Cantt Division SP Investigation Asim Iftikhar was leading the joint police teams investigating the case, another police official said.

In June, two foreign women, nationals of the Netherlands and Venezuela, were allegedly abducted and sexually assaulted in the Defence C police station area.

According to the FIR, the women were abducted by five suspects, including a close relative of a senior political personality, who demanded ransom and subjected them to sexual assault during their captivity.