Retired police officer’s son arrested in Karachi gangrape case

Police in Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Hadeed have arrested the son of a retired police officer in connection with the gangrape of a young woman.

Phone records showed the man was in contact with the 19-year-old girl. He will be presented in court tomorrow.

Police on February 13 said that they have arrested three men after the girl identified them. She had said she was kidnapped by men on February 9 from Gulshan-e-Hadeed when she had left for college. The girl was found unconscious the next day by Defence police, which informed Steel Town police.

The Steel Town police registered an FIR against the suspects and said that they arrested them within hours. The East-Zone Deputy Inspector General of Police Nauman Siddiqui has formed a seven-member team comprising Malir SSP, SSP Investigation, SP and a high-ranking woman police official to probe the case.

A member of the investigation team, who did not want to be named, said that the team visited the crime scene, obtained CCTV footages, and used the call data record of the victim and the suspects.

Police have now said that the three were not involved in the crime. The suspects’ DNA samples did not match with those at the crime scenes, they said. A judicial magistrate had remanded the three in police custody till February 22.

The medico-legal exam of the victim has been conducted, sources told Samaa Digital. Authorities have not commented on the report details yet.

An official claimed that the statement of the eyewitnesses present on the abduction point and CCTV footages suggested the girl was not kidnapped. “Footage shows that the girl hired a rickshaw and she rode it by her own consent.”

An official said that police detained another man, in his early 20s, but his involvement was also not proved. “The man told the police that he became friends with the victim on telephone but he never met her,” the official added.

The victim’s father told a private source that he was not aware of these developments, and said his elder brother is dealing with the police for now.

He had said earlier that he had received a call in the morning at 10:30am from Defence police station and they told him they have found an “orphan girl” from a road and taken her to the police station.

A man named Fawad forced the girl to sit in his car and took her to an unidentified location, where he and his friends raped her, according to the FIR at the Steel Town police station.

Her father had told the police that his daughter can identify the men.