April 23, 2007	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 05, 1428

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ISLAMABAD, April 22: A family from Jhelum district whose two girls were sexually abused by an influential man has sought refuge in Lal Masjid where a parallel judicial system has been introduced to decide civil disputes under the mosque administration’s self-defined Sharia.

“We got protection of Lal Masjid administration after being threatened by the rapist,” the rape victims - aged 16 and 17 - told a news conference in the mosque on Sunday.

The sheltering of rape victims in Lal Masjid shows that people from a section of society still believe that the mosque administration will provide them justice and protection which they did not get from the state.

“We are not deciding this case in our Qazi court but sending it to the government as a test case and expect that the victims will be provided justice and the culprit given exemplary punishment,” deputy incharge of the mosque, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi said on the occasion.

Giving details about the agony they had gone through, the two girls said an influential man, Azhar Iqbal Awan who they said was very close to the district nazim of Jhelum, had destroyed their family. “First he made my brother a drug addict and got registered a fake case of drug peddling against my mother and managed to send her behind bars,” one of the victims said.

She said after the arrest of her mother, she and her two sisters became helpless and the accused used to visit their house frequently.

The accused took one of the sisters to his house on the pretext of providing her help and getting her mother released from the police custody. The accused kept her in his house for six months and disgraced her, said Maulana Ghazi.

The accused along with his nephew, Imran, also raped the younger sister and made her pregnant. “We have got her examined medically from the Holy Family Hospital and a private laboratory and the tests confirmed her pregnancy,” he said.

He said fearing reaction from the

influential man the victims did not dare to go to the police for lodging a case against him.

The people of the country, he said, still believed that the solution to all their problems was in the enforcement of Islamic system; therefore, they were approaching the Lal Masjid to get justice.

Maulana Ghazi demanded that the government, PML president Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Chief Justice Lahore High Court Chaudhry Iftikhar Hussain should take action against the accused so that the ill-fated family could get justice.