NOWSHERA: Awami National Party senior vice president Ameer Haider Khan Hoti said on Wednesday that government should review the Zainab Alert Bill recently passed by the National Assembly and remove lacunas from it to award exemplary punishment to rapists.

“Members of National Assembly should play their active role and put recommendations for making the bill more effective to avoid incidents like that of Ziarat Kaka Sahib, where an eight-year-old girl was brutally killed,” he said.

Mr Hoti said this during his visit to the hujra of the aggrieved family. He was accompanied by ANP district president Jamal Khan, Mian Yahya Shah and other office-bearers of the party’s Nowshera chapter.

Mr Hoti said that ANP would soon table a bill in the provincial assembly to seek exemplary punishment to rapists. He said that he would not wait for government to table the bill and would raise the issue in assembly enact law against such crimes.

He urged all institutions to play active role for revamping the society on right track.

However, the women wing of Jamaat-i-Islami rejected Zainab Alert Bill and said that it provided space to criminals involved in such heinous crimes.

Addressing a press conference, JI women wing deputy chief Rashid Riffat, provincial chief Inayat Begum and MPA Humera Hamza said that Prime Minister Imran Khan was talking about the state of Madina but his government removed Islamic punishments from Zainab Alert Bill.

They said that secular governments like China, India and others had banned porn websites but government of Pakistan failed to protect young generation form such harmful websites.

Meanwhile, DPO Kashif Zulfiqar told journalists that after confession of the main suspect in the minor girl murder case, police were trying their best to collect solid evidence to help the court in providing speedy justice to aggrieved family.

Federal Minister for Defence Pervez Khattak along with PTI local leaders also visited the hujra of the aggrieved family and extended support to it.

Also, Nowshera District Bar Association through a unanimously passed resolution decided that local lawyers would not represent the suspect in court.

The decision was made in a meeting of the bar association held here on Wednesday with its president Mian Sajjad Ali Shah in the chair. The meeting also decided to provide free legal services to the affected family.

The participants of the meeting said that SP Sajjad Khan would be requested to visit the bar association and brief the lawyers regarding new developments in the case.

A committee of senior lawyers was also formed to follow the case.

Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2020