KARACHI: A sessions court has sentenced a man to 10-years rigorous imprisonment in a case pertaining to the rape of a teenage girl.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Ghulam Mustafa Laghari, who is also the presiding officer of the Gender-Based Trial Court (Central), found Imtiaz Ahmed guilty of committing an offence under Section 376 (rape) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC).

After pronouncing the verdict, the court ordered the police to take the accused person into custody as he appeared before the court on bail.

In the detailed verdict, the judge observed: “All the prosecution witnesses (PW) have fully supported the victim’s version. The learned defence counsel put a cross to the prosecution witnesses at length but has not unshaken the evidence of PWs, nor any material contradiction brou­ght on record in the evid­ence of prosecution witn­esses in their cross-examination, though some minor contradictions have come on record, but such minor contradictions are not fatal to the prosecution case.”

The court also fined him Rs10,000 and ruled that in case of default, he shall serve additional six months in jail.

According to state prosecutor Hina Naz Shams, on April 5, 2019, the complainant, brother of the survivor, informed the police that one of his sisters, around 13 to 14 years old, went missing and he suspected his neighbor Imtiaz of her abduction. After the registration of an FIR, the police recovered the girl and arrested the accused from Swat through tracing the call record data of the accused person.

In her testimony before the court, the survivor stated that late at night, someone knocked on their door. She found that the accused Imtiaz, along with three absconding co-accused — khala (maternal aunt of accused), Akbar, and Salahuddin — was there. Imtiaz allegedly put a cloth over her mouth, causing her to lose consciousness, and when she woke up, she was in Swat where the accused raped her. The survivor alleged that the accused and his maternal aunt forcefully took her thumb impression on a nikahnama.

The investigating offic­er of the case informed the court that he had approached the nikah khwan for verification of the nikahnama, but failed to receive any response from him.

Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2024