Pakistan: PTI Sindh lawmaker arrested on sexual harassment case

INTERNATIONAL DESK: Pakistani police arrested a Sindh lawmaker belonging to the former Prime Minister Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party from his apartment over a sexual harassment case, local media reported.

The arrest took place on Sunday morning. The provincial party leadership lambasted at the arrest of the PTI’s member of the Sindh Assembly. They termed the FIR and the arrest as ‘suspicious’.

PTI’s Sher Zaman said ‘fake’ cases were being registered against party leaders to stop their public protests. Moreover, former Sindh governor Imran Ismail said the MPA had been arrested on a ‘suspicious and fake’ FIR.

While speaking with Pakistan’s local media outlet, the Dawn, South-SSP Asad Raza said that PTI lawmakers Khurram Sher Zaman and Haleem Adil Sheikh approached the Boat Basin police for lodging an FIR pertaining to the kidnapping of their colleague.

However, they were told that their party Member of the Provincial Assembly (MPA) had been arrested in a sexual harassment case that took place in Keamari.

In the FIR, the complainant woman stated that she lived in a rented house in Liaquatabad. According to her statement, she was ‘familiar’ with the PTI lawmaker and asked him for a job.

Continuing to narrate what lead to the alleged incident, the woman said that the legislator called her at an office on Saturday evening from where he took her to a warehouse in his car.

The complainant said that the vehicle stopped suddenly in darkness on a road. She claimed that the PTI provincial lawmaker tried to sexually assault her. The woman said she raised a hue and cry and got off the car and the MPA fled from there, as per the media portal.

Acting on the complaint by the woman, the SITE-B police registered the case under Section 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

Meanwhile, the Lahore province reported a large number of cases of sexual assault in the previous week. The alarming frequency of the cases prompted the Pakistan police to review the overall performance of the Gender-Based Violence Cell.

As per the report, a total of 57 cases of rape were reported in the media out of which Punjab reported the highest of 38 cases, while Sindh reported 13 cases followed by 3 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and 2 cases from Islamabad. It was earlier reported that Pakistan’s Global Gender Gap Index has worsened over time. In 2017, Pakistan ranked 143, slipping to 148 in 2018.

According to the last year’s ‘Global Gender Gap Report 2021’, Pakistan ranked 153 out of 156 countries on the gender parity index, that is, among the last four. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP)’s recent report said that in Pakistan, at least 11 rape cases are reported daily with over 22,000 such incidents reported to police in the last six years (2015-21). (ANI)