Pakistani police hunt for gang rape culprits

Reuters:

Pakistani police are hunting a dozen men in connection with the gang rape of a woman, including two set free this week by a lower court in the southern city of Karachi, police said on Wednesday.

The case has parallels with that of Mukhtaran Mai, a village woman who became an international symbol for women's rights after speaking out against her gang rape ordeal three years ago.

Mariam Bano, 35, says she was raped by five men last month near her house in a poor area of Karachi.

Coming from a traditional community originally from rural Sindh province, Bano's family sought justice from the clan's eight-member jirga (council), which pardoned the rapists after money was paid to some of the victim's relatives.

Bano and her husband, however, refused to be bought off and went to the mainstream judicial system seeking justice against the rapists and the jirga members.

But on Monday a judicial magistrate set free two of the jirga members, while remanding one of the accused rapists.

A distraught Bano had to be restrained from jumping from a second-floor window in the court house, and in the ensuing uproar the case was brought to the attention of a more senior judge, who ordered a fresh inquiry.

"We want justice. No compensation is enough for us, and we only want that the rapists and jirga members should be punished," Bano's husband Abdul Rasheed Chandio said.

Shahid Qureshi, an investigating officer, said a hunt was now on for 12 men, including the two freed earlier, and police had to submit a report within three days.

Gang rapes and honor killings often occur in feudal, rural Pakistan, but are less common in urban areas.

In Mai's case a village council ordered that she be gang-raped as a punishment after her brother, who was just 12 at the time, was judged to have offended tribal honor by befriending a 30-year-old woman from a more powerful clan.

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