KARACHI: A teenager girl was drugged and raped allegedly by her friend(s) at a farmhouse in Gulshan-i-Maymar on Friday morning, police and hospital officials said.

A police officer claimed to have arrested three suspects while the fourth one escaped from the crime scene. He said that the girl, a resident of Landhi, arrived at the farmhouse in Maymar at around 3am with four young men, where she was allegedly given some intoxicants and later on raped.

The girl was taken to a nearby private hospital off the Superhighway. The hospital authorities told the police about the incident at around 7am. Later on, the police took the victim girl to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital for a medical examination.

Additional police surgeon Dr Saleem Shaikh told Dawn that the girl aged around 17-18 years had been raped. She was also drugged before being assaulted, he added.

Malir SSP Munir Ahmed Shaikh told the media that the victim had reportedly been upset with her family and went to the farmhouse with her friends, where she was given sleeping drugs in a drink and then raped.

Maymar SHO Jamshed Ahmed Khan told Dawn that the police arrested the three suspects, including a friend of the girl.

In the evening, the girl’s uncle arrived at the police station with the girl’s grandmother and a maternal aunt and got an FIR (No167) registered against the three held suspects.

The case has been registered under sections 342 (punishment for wrongful confinement), 337-J (causing hurt by mean of a poison), 376 (punishment for rape), 511 (punishment for attempting to commit offences punishable with imprisonment for life or for a shorter terms) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

The officer said that the fourth suspect managed to escape from the crime scene.

The girl in her statement before the police, however, denied that she had been ‘raped’.

Instead, she told the police that the escaped suspect tried to rape her. He beat her and tried to strangle her, but the arrested suspects ‘saved’ her, she claimed.

However, the police did not believe her statement as the doctors confirmed that she was subjected to criminal assault, said the SHO. Additional police surgeon Dr Shaikh said that there were “no marks of beating or strangulation”.

Meanwhile, Sindh IGP Amjad Javed Saleemi took notice of the incident and directed the Malir SSP to furnish a detailed inquiry report about the incident.

A police officer said one of the arrested suspects told the investigators that the girl was his friend who left her home in Landhi to meet him on Thursday.

Since she stayed with him till late night, she told him that she would go home on Friday morning. Therefore, he and his three other friends went to the farmhouse.

The suspect told the police that when one of his friends tried to rape his girlfriend, he and his two other friends put up resistance, which prompted a scuffle among them.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2018