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KARACHI: A minor girl was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and killed before being dumped in a deserted area of Karachi's Sachal Goth on Friday, according to police and hospital officials.
Officials said that the body of the seven-year-old girl was recovered from bushes near Abdullah Shah Ghazi Goth in the outskirts of Karachi.
The body was shifted to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for a postmortem.
“She was strangulated to death,” said additional police surgeon of the hospital, Dr Rohina Hasan.
“She was raped and subjected to sodomy also before being murdered,” the health official told Dawn.
He further said that the body bore marks of torture and added that the crime had taken place 10 to 12 hours before it was brought to the hospital around noon.
Sohrab Goth DSP Mohammad Khalid Khan said that the girl had gone missing from her residence in Abdullah Shah Ghazi Goth on Thursday.
The family had lodged her missing report at Sachal police station at around 9:30pm on Thursday and her body was found on Friday morning from a ditch surrounded by bushes near Al Azhar Garden residential complex.
The officer said that the police have started conducting raids and are hoping that the culprit(s) would be arrested soon.
Earlier in Feb, a one-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped before being strangled to death in Karachi.
Take a look: Toddler raped, strangled in Karachi
Last year in November, a six-year-old girl was strangled and dumped near a garbage heap in Quetta after being subjected to rape attempts.
Know more: Six-year-old Hazara girl murdered in Quetta after attempted rape
Rape is notoriously difficult to prosecute in Pakistan, where women are often treated as second-class citizens.
In April 2011, the Supreme Court had upheld the acquittal of five men sentenced to death in Pakistan's most famous rape case, that of Mukhtar Mai.
Mai was gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council as punishment, after her brother, who was aged just 12 at the time, was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan.
A local court had sentenced six men to death, but a higher court acquitted five of them in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Khaliq, to life imprisonment.
