Muzaffargarh police on Wednesday arrested a man for allegedly sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the city's Wasandywaly area, police said.

The first information report (FIR) of the incident, which took place on August 1, was registered on August 16 against two men, one of whom was unidentified. In the FIR, lodged on the complaint of the victim's mother, the suspects have also been accused of filming the girl, aged between 12 and 13, while she was being raped.

The girl's mother stated in the FIR, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, that she belonged to a poor family and survived by begging for alms.

On August 1, the applicant's daughter was returning home from Wasandywaly around 6:30 in the evening where she had gone for work when the main suspect along with an unknown man came close to the girl on a motorcycle and told her that "your mother is at our home," the FIR stated.

"[They] told her your mother is calling you. Therefore, you should sit with us [on the motorcycle] and we will take you to her," it read.

However, the girl refused to accompany the men. "The suspects forcefully made [my] daughter sit on the motorcycle and took her to a shop. After closing the shop, the main suspect kept sexually assaulting my daughter while the unknown man made a video [of the act]."

The men fled after the victim started screaming, according to the FIR. The girl then came home crying and narrated her ordeal to her mother in the presence of two witnesses, it said.

The woman said that the primary suspect's relatives had been "pleading" with her and asking her to resolve the "problem" among themselves but she had refused.

The FIR was registered under Sections 376 (rape), 292-A (exposure to seduction) and 292-B (child pornography) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

Separately, Muzaffargarh police spokesperson Wasim Khan Gopang said a medical examination of the girl had been conducted, the results of which were awaited. Further investigation was underway.

'8 children abused daily'

As many as 2,960 major crimes against children were reported in the four provinces, Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) in 2020.

According to data released by the NGO Sahil, eight children were abused every day in Pakistan in one form or the other, while 51 per cent of the victims were girls and 49pc boys.

Out of the reported cases, 985 were of sodomy, 787 rape, 89 pornography and child sexual abuse and 80 were of murder after sexual abuse. Cases of abduction, missing children and child marriages were 834, 345 and 119, respectively.