LAHORE: A district and sessions court on Monday sent eight men, accused of gang raping a teenage girl in Lahore, on a three-day physical remand in police custody.
Police prosecutor Advocate Muhammad Asif had asked on-duty Judicial Magistrate Zeb Shahzad Cheema for a 10-day remand in order to conduct DNA tests of the arrested suspects.
Six suspects were arrested on Saturday and the main suspect, a PML-N youth wing member, as well as the hotel manager, were arrested on Sunday.
On Sunday, DNA tests of six of the suspected rapists arrested by police, and the victim, were conducted by the Punjab Forensic Science Agency.
Deputy Inspector General Operations Dr Haider Ashraf had during a press conference on Sunday said forensic experts would conduct DNA tests of the remaining two suspects on Monday.
Ordering a three-day remand, the judge directed police to present a medical report on the date of the next hearing.
One of the accused had legal representation. His lawyer, Advocate Younis Awan said that the accused would be willing to provide all information regarding his whereabouts at the time of the crime and maintained that his client was innocent. Awan said he did not know why his client had been nominated in the First Information Report (FIR).
The other seven accused did not have legal representation.
The FIR was initially registered against the suspects under Sections 376 and 506 of the Pakistan Penal Code. Police have now also added abduction to the list of charges against the eight accused.
A group of men gang-raped a teenage girl in Lahore in a Mall Road guest house on Saturday after drugging her, police earlier said.
The 15-year-old rape survivor was brought to Services Hospital where reports of initial medical tests revealed that the girl had been subjected to rape. The girl, an 8th grade student, is receiving treatment.
The teenager, who is a resident of Multan Road, was first kidnapped by unidentified men before she was taken to a guest house in the Mall Road area, said Station House Officer (SHO) Ahmad Usman.
"The girl was drugged and later six to eight men gang-raped her," added SHO Usman. The survivor was also tortured physically, stated the SHO.
The girl’s mother earlier claimed that her daughter was going to a tailor shop along with her brother when some unidentified men bundled her into a car and fled away.
She said her son reached home and the family launched a search on their own to find her but to no avail.
She said at around 11pm on Friday a text message was received on their mobile phone: “Your daughter is lying unconscious in room number 230 of a hotel on The Mall.”
She said the family found the girl lying unconscious in the hotel room when they reached along with police.
Quoting her daughter, she alleged that the suspect connected to the PML-N youth wing and his accomplices kidnapped her from Multan Road and forced her to drink some intoxicated liquid after which she lost her consciousness.
The girl said the suspects took her to the hotel where 10 men gang-raped her and left her in an inebriated condition and fled.
Racecourse police recovered the girl from the hotel room, shifted her to the Services Hospital and registered a case against 10 suspects on the complaint of the victim’s mother.
SHO Ahmad Usman earlier said forensic experts had been called to collect evidence from the hotel room and initial medical examination reports also confirmed that the girl was gang-raped.
The victim’s sister earlier told Dawn that police were pressuring their family to exclude the name of the main suspect from the FIR.
She said police started action against the suspects after some TV channels aired the news and appealed to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif for justice.
