The police in the Pakistani town of Muzaffarabad which is close to Multan has arrested 20 persons following two sexual assaults in the area.
The sad case is that after a 12-year old girl was raped while cutting grass in the field, the village elders ordered that the 17-year old sister of the rapist be made to face the same fate.
According to police report, the first victim reported the rape to her mother who then reported to village elders.
“(The second victim)’s two elder sisters were initially called, but the elders decided that (17-year-old) Victim B would be the one to take the punishment. Her mothers and sisters all protested this but the elders brought out their guns and threatened to kill them,” the police report said.
Speaking to CNN, the Muzaffarabad Station House officer Rashid Faheem said that investigation is ongoing, adding that more raids will be carried out.
According to Salman Sufi, the director of Violence Against Women Centre in Multan, the mothers of both victims had come to the centre with their daughters after the two incidents.
“Medical examinations have been conducted on both of them and they have confirmed that both girls were raped,” Sufi said.
He said that the first victim and her mother came to the centre three days after the second victim had arrived with her mother on July 19.
The centre, which opened in March 2017, had received 38 cases of rape in that region alone, Sufi said adding that “the Punjab government will make sure that this case will go to court and that justice will be done.”
Rape and honour killings as a form of punishment are not new in Pakistan.
CNN reports that in 2002, then-28 year old Mukhtar Mai was gang raped on the orders of a tribal court — a jirga — after her brother was accused of having a sexual relationship with an older woman in another tribe.
The Punjab governor later found him to be wrongly accused.
Mai told CNN in 2013: “First of all, there was the rape, and afterwards when I tried to call the police, I received death threats that I would be killed if I went to a police station.”
A Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch was killed in July 2016 by her brother, who believed she was “bringing dishonor to (his) family.”
When her brother was arrested, he told the police that he had no regrets.
The Pakistani government had also said that persons guilty of honour killings will serve at least 25 years being bars, adding that the rape of minors will be punishable by deat