DADU: Lilan Rind, mother of Gul Sama, has demanded legal action against the elements who “fabricated” the “story” of them stoning their own daughter to death and used this to victimise and humiliate her and her family after what she said was the accidental death of her child in a landslide.

In her first media talk in Shahi Makan on Friday after release from police custody a day before, she said that they had been branded and paraded as grave sinners before society over the “lie” that they had stoned their daughter to death under a jirga verdict.

She demanded immediate release of her husband Ali Bux who was still in police custody and appealed to chief justice of Pakistan, chief of army staff and Prime Minister Imran Khan to take action against the people who had spun and spread the “fake news” for mala fide intentions.

She alleged that police had pressured her during custody to admit that her daughter was stoned to death under the jirga verdict though she and her husband had informed Wahi Pandhi police the day her daughter had the accident that she had died in a landslide.

She said that she was a respectable woman as she had never seen a police station before but over the days since her daughter’s death she and her husband were being treated like criminals.

She asked civil society and human rights activists where they were now and who would serve them justice after the honour of her family had been tarnished.

Meanwhile, Dadu SSP Dr Farrukh Raza Malik said that the case’s investigation would proceed now in the light of results of chemical examination of the girl’s body samples. Lilan Rind was released under Section 497 CrPC but Ali Bux Rind and Maulvi Mumtaz Leghari were still being interrogated, he said.

Published in Dawn, December 7th, 2019