A band of Muslims this month severely beat a pregnant Christian woman
in Punjab’s Narowal district--causing her to lose female twins to
miscarriage--in an effort pressure her family into dropping charges of
raping her 13-year-old niece, the woman’s husband said.
Asher Masih of Dhamala village told Compass by phone that the men attacked his home on May 8.
“All three male members of our family, including my father, brother
and myself, were out for work when Irfan Safdar and his accomplices
trespassed into our house and started beating up my mother,
sister-in-law and my wife, who was in her fifth month of pregnancy,
mercilessly,” he said.
Masih’s elderly mother said she pleaded for the attackers to spare his wife, but they did not listen.
“They murdered our children, they raped our daughter,” she said. “We have nothing left with us.”
In a country where Muslim criminals believe police and courts will
give little credence to the complaints of Christians, the family accuses
three Muslims of gang-raping the girl at an outhouse on March 29.
“She had gone to a nearby field to use the toilet when she was
forcibly taken away by three men later identified as Irfan Safdar and
Shahid. Their third accomplice remains unidentified as yet,” Masih said.
“At first we thought that she might have stopped at some neighbor’s
house, but when she did not return after a long time, we set out to look
for her.”
He said a villager informed the family that he had seen Safdar and
two others taking the girl to an outhouse. The family rushed to the
site, but Safdar and his accomplices fled, Masih said.
“We found [name withheld] inside the outhouse, raped and badly injured,” he said.
Masih said the family tried to register a First Information Report
(FIR) with local police, but officers turned a deaf ear, as Safdar is
the son of former police inspector Safdar Bajwa.
“They also refused to register [the victim’s] statement under Section 164, which is mandatory in such cases,” he said.
Police refused to file their complaint for more than a week, during
which time the suspects repeatedly threatened the family, he said.
“They told us we were poor and weak and could not face them no matter
how much we tried,” Masih said. “There are about four or five Christian
families in the overwhelmingly Muslim village, but almost everyone is
fed up with the Bajwa family because of their criminal activities.”
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