https://arab.news/9bfv4
- Officials say police teams formed immediately after complaint filed to search for suspect who is on the run
- Experts say heinous sexual crimes on the rise in Pakistan, less than 2% rape cases result in conviction
ISLAMABAD: A Swedish woman working for an international agency in Islamabad was raped earlier this week by a guard employed at her home, a senior police official confirmed on Thursday, saying the suspect was on the run.
Police said the woman, whose name Arab News is withholding, had filed a complaint at Islamabad’s Aabpara police station that she was raped at her home in the G6/4 sector on the night of Monday, June 6. The woman identified her attacker as a guard named Muhammad Safeer. A first information report (FIR) has been filed under sections 376 and 377 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which deals with rape.
“This incident took place on June 6 in the jurisdiction of Aabpara police station,” police superintendent Nosherwan Ali told Arab News, saying police teams were formed as soon as the complaint was received and were searching for the suspect.
“No one has been arrested so far but we have made progress in the investigation and got clues, which will help in the arrest of the culprit very soon,” Ali added.
According to the police report, a copy of which is available with Arab News, the complainant is a Swedish national working since January as a fellow with an international aid agency. The report says the woman was attacked and overpowered by her guard while she was sleeping and then sexually assaulted.
“I managed to convince him [attacker] to turn my bedside light on and then I could see it was guard Muhammad Safeer,” the woman was quoted in the police report as saying. “I also recognized his voice.”
“I want legal action against the man that raped me. I ask for justice,” she said.
A spokesperson for the agency where the woman works declined comment on the case.
Activists say heinous sexual crimes are on the rise in Pakistan.
Last month, three employees of a private train service allegedly gang-raped a female passenger returning to Karachi from Multan, just days after two unidentified robbers gang-raped a 13-year-old child at gun-point in front of her family on a roadside near the central Pakistani city of Patoki.
The incidents evoked memories of a widely reported assault in September 2020 in which a woman was gang-raped on a major highway in front of her two children.
Fewer than three percent of sexual assault or rape cases result in a conviction in Pakistan, according to the Karachi-based group War Against Rape.
Former prime minister Imran Khan's government passed an anti-rape criminal law in parliament last year. The law aims to create a national sex offenders register, protect the identity of survivors and set up special fast-track courts to hear rape cases and reach a verdict within four months.