Lahore rapists still at large
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LAHORE: Police have so far been unable to identify and arrest the culprits who raped a five-year-old girl and threw her outside the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital four days ago.
On Sunday, however, police detained some suspects and interrogated people of Ghosia Colony, Mughalpura, from where the girl had been abducted. They showed photographs and sketches of the suspects to people.
According to police investigators, two suspects resembling the two people seen in CCTV footages are under investigation.
They said the suspects had not yet been shown to the girl for identification because of her medical and mental condition and the language problem. But, they added, some sketches drawn with the help of CCTV footages had been shown to her.
Police have got another CCTV footage which captured a scene outside the hospital and given it to the media to seek help from citizens.
The footage shows a person entering from the Queen’s Road side and dropping the girl in the lawns and leaving the premises from the British Council side.
A senior police investigator told Dawn that the suspect who had dropped the girl in the hospital lawns might be the real culprit or an accomplice. After the girl had been dropped by the suspect, he said, a security guard took her to the emergency ward. The investigator said police were focusing on showing the sketches and the arrested suspects to residents of Ghosia Colony.
He said the girl who speaks Pashto was still in a state of shock and not in a condition to identify the culprits through sketches.
He said swabs of some suspects would be sent to the Punjab Forensic Science Agency, Lahore, on Monday for DNA matching. The investigator said the face of the suspect seen in the fresh video footage was quite clear. According to him, the investigation might take a week or so.
Meanwhile, news agencies said rights campaigners organised protest rallies across the country against the rape on Saturday and Sunday. They demanded arrest of the culprits. Widespread outrage dominated social media while private TV channels prominently broadcast reports on the girl and her ordeal.
