By Waqar Hussain | AFP News – 19 hours ago
A
21-year-old woman was raped and hanged from a tree in Pakistan, police said, in
a case bearing a chilling resemblance to a spate of similar attacks that
sparked outrage in neighbouring India.
The
woman's boyfriend of six months, named by police as Muhammad Saqib, confessed
to the rape and murder and has been taken into custody, police said.
Saqib
admitted he tried to force the woman -- the daughter of blind parents -- to
have sex with two of his friends, according to police. When she refused,
investigators said the pair argued.
The
woman, whom he allegedly had promised to marry, was found hanging from a tree
the next morning.
Police
are still looking for the two alleged accomplices.
"The
incident occurred in Layyah district (in Punjab province) on Thursday night and
was reported to the police on Friday when the local people saw a woman hung
from a tree," senior police official Ghazi Salahudin told AFP.
He
said the woman was raped and strangled to death, and then her body was hanged
to make it look like a suicide.
"But
the branch was so low and the dead body was touching the ground in sitting
position," he said.
The
woman was the eldest of eight siblings and made a living by farming a small
piece of land.
The
incident has disturbing similarities to an attack in India last month, in which
two teenage girls were found gang-raped and hanged from a mango tree in
northern Uttar Pradesh state.
That
attack sparked protests over police apathy, and was the latest to highlight
India's dismal record on preventing sexual violence. Similar headline-making
cases have piled pressure on the authorities there.
Pakistani
police said Saqib had met the woman after he visited her house in his role as
an assistant at a vegetable wholesale shop. They allegedly had been in a
relationship for about six months.
A
day before the murder, police said, Saqib had brought the woman for a date in
the shop where he worked. He took her to the roof, where two of his friends
were waiting.
When
Saqib tried to persuade the woman to have sex with all three of them, she
resisted, according to police.
She
was then allegedly raped and killed. Police said Saqib had confessed to the
attack, adding that they were still investigating if the woman had been raped
by the other men as well.
Though
the issues of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence are not as
high-profile in Pakistan as they have been in India in recent years, they are
widespread in the deeply conservative country.
In
March, a 17-year-old Pakistani victim of a gang-rape died after self-immolating
in protest at a police decision to turn a key suspect free.
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