Pakistani police arrested another suspect today during a stepped up hunt for men accused of gang-raping a teenager on the orders of a tribal council.
Police said initially they were looking for four men, but one man was arrested overnight from Lasbala in southwestern Baluchistan province. The second suspect was arrested in the nearby Multan city after he walked into a local newspaper in a bid to give himself up.
Police were rebuked by a special bench of the Supreme Court yesterday for laxity in pursuing the offenders, and were criticised for taking more than a week to register the June 22 case, in which the tribal council ordered the rape as punishment for an alleged affair between the victim's 11-year-old brother and a 30-year-old woman from a tribe of higher status.
A tribal assembly, with no legal standing, held a hearing into the alleged affair on June 22, and ordered that the boy's 18-year-old sister be gang-raped in punishment.
President Pervez Musharraf and Punjab governor Khalid Maqbool Ahmed both gave the police deadlines this week to arrest the offenders.
In a strongly-worded condemnation of the rape and police response to it, Amnesty International yesterday called on authorities to prevent tribal assemblies taking the law into their own hands.
It said it was concerned at reports that such councils had illegally tried and sentenced people to "cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments."
AFP