LAHORE: An anti-terrorism court (ATC) in Lahore on Monday acquitted three more accused in one of the 29 cases filed in the Kasur child sex abuse scandal that came to the fore in 2015.
The court acquitted the accused due to “lack of evidence”.
On February 24, the court had also acquitted 12 men involved in the case.
The men who were accused of raping a teenager in Kasur were released due to a “lack of evidence”. The prosecution had produced 16 witnesses against the accused during the course of the proceedings.
Last year, the court had acquitted 11 people that had been nominated in separate cases of the scandal, with four being released in August and seven in September.
Earlier this year, the court had handed life imprisonment to a man after finding him guilty in the case.
Haseem Amir was sentenced to life imprisonment by ATC Judge Chaudhry Muhammad Ilyas in one of the 29 cases that were registered against him since 2015. Previously, he had received life imprisonment in at least two cases after the prosecution accused him and others of sexually assaulting minors and blackmailing their families using the videos of the act.
The court acquitted Aleem Asif, Maqsood Sindhi and Naseem Shahzad due to the lack of evidence.
The Kasur child abuse scandal came to light in July 2015 when Ganda Singhwala police booked a gang of 15 suspects in Hussain Khanwala village and arrested three of them on charges of sexually assaulting hundreds of minors and blackmailing them using videos of the act.
According to the FIR [First Information Report], the gang had extorted millions of rupees as well as gold jewellery from villagers by blackmailing them with the videos of the victims since 2009.