KARACHI, April 25: Firdous Begum, who ran the makeshift maternity home where a pregnant woman died after being operated upon by a quack, was not authorized to run such a facility, the police said on Friday.

“She doesn’t have any certificate, any authorization,” an official of the Quaidabad police station told Dawn. Firdous Begum and the quack who operated upon Rukhsana had been booked under section 322 of the Pakistan Penal Code for “qatl-bis-sabab”, or unintentional murder, he said.

Firdous, a divorcee, had been in police custody for interrogation for seven days and the police were trying to track down the quack, a resident of Al-Falah Colony, who went into hiding soon after the incident, the policeman told Dawn.

A visit on Thursday night to the “Firdous Maternity Home” in Quaidabad revealed that it utterly lacked the facilities and arrangements needed to undertake caesarean section operations. The “maternity home” is set up in an 80-square-yard rented house situated in one of the narrow lanes of the area.

The signboard was not there, as it had been taken away by the police. There was just a small board which said: “Rs800 for normal delivery”.

Two residents of the neighbourhood — Saleem Qadri and Mohammad Riaz — said Firdous was an untrained midwife who had contacts with several fake doctors. “Whenever, a case landed at her doorstep, she called one of these ‘doctors’ and soon an ‘operation’ got under way,” said Saleem.

Riaz, a shopkeeper, said the quack known as “Dr Imran” had operated upon Rukhsana on Monday.

“Nobody knows this character well, not even Firdous, I think. She heard about Imran only a couple of weeks ago and yet she called him for the ‘operation’ when Rukhsana’s husband came calling. This is the mistake for which she is paying dearly.”

Sub-Inspector Shahid of the Quaidabad police station said no qualified doctor could do what Imran had done.

“First of all he slit open the body of a woman not knowing exactly how this should be done. As a result, he cut several parts of her body which shouldn’t have been cut. Then when the woman’s baby had been removed, he simply sewed up the skin, leaving the parts he had cut unintentionally unattended and untreated.

“So even though she had been sown up, Rukhsana was bleeding internally. This is the main reason why she died.”

Meanwhile, Pakistan Penal Code’s Section 322 — under which Firdous and Imran have been booked — reads: “The court shall, subject to the Injunctions of Islam, as laid down in the Holy Quran, and Sunnah and keeping in view the financial position of the convict and the heirs of the victim, fix the value of diyat which shall not be less that the value of thirty thousand six hundred and thirty grams of silver”.

And according to Section 321 of the PPC, “Whoever, without any intention to cause death of, or cause harm to, any person, does any unlawful act which becomes a cause for the death of another person, is said to commit “qatl-bis-sabab”.

A legal expert told Dawn that there were no specific laws against quackery and the police had no option but to book the offender under Section 322 of the PPC in case of a death of a patient being treated by a quack.

He said the person convicted under Section 322 could always get released after the payment of the diyat. Under the law, the convict remains in jail until he or she pays the diyat.

It follows then that Firdous will be released once she pays an acceptable sum. Whether she will return to running a “maternity home” remains to be seen.

According to the Pakistan Medical Association, 30,000 to 40,000 quacks operate in Karachi alone. And the total number of quacks in the country is estimated to be upwards of 600,000.

And a Pakistani woman loses her life in childbirth every 20 minutes or so. One of the main reasons for this high rate of maternal death is quackery which is rampant and against which no meaningful measures have been taken so far, says the PMA.