A local court in Karachi was informed on Saturday that five suspects involved in the alleged rape of a woman in the moving Bahaudin Zakaria Express had also filmed the incident on their mobile phones to blackmail her.
Inspector Habibullah Khattak disclosed this before Judicial Magistrate (South) Shahnawaz in a progress report.
Railway police had arrested a station manager and four ticket-checkers of the Bahaudin Zakaria Express for allegedly sexually assaulting a 25-year-old victim in a Karachi-bound train on May 27.
Following the ordeal, the victim told a police surgeon at JPMC that she got divorced around three months ago and she had gone to meet her children in Muzaffargarh. She was returning via train when at Rohri a ticket-checker offered her a seat in the air-conditioned compartment of the train, in which the alleged assault took place.
On Saturday, the investigating officer (IO) produced the suspects before the court on the expiry of their physical remand and sought an extension.
He said that during the course of interrogation it had emerged that the suspects had not only allegedly taken turns to rape the victim, they had also filmed the incident in a bid to blackmail her to not disclose the episode to anyone.
Khattak added that the cell phones of all the five detained suspects had to be recovered to retrieve the footage and send it for forensic analysis.
The IO said that the uniforms the suspects wore on the day of the alleged incident also needed to be recovered as they had allegedly hidden them somewhere.
He requested the magistrate to extend the physical remand of the suspects in police custody.
Granting the request, the judge extended their physical remand by two days, directing the IO to produce them at the next date along with an investigation report.
In the last hearing, the victim had identified two of the five detained staffers of the train, being privately run between Multan and Karachi, as the individuals who had allegedly subjected her to sexual assault and also facilitated their accomplices in this act.
A case was lodged under Sections 377 (punishment for rape) and 34 (common intent) of the Pakistan Penal Code at the Pakistan Railways City Police Station on the complaint of the victim.