A teenage girl was allegedly kidnapped and raped in Karachi’s Mehmoodabad area earlier this month, a local media outlet reported on Monday.
Police said that the girl, who is around 16 years old, was kidnapped from near the army graveyard in Chanesar Goth on November 11.
Her family lodged a kidnapping case at Mehmoodabad police station and the police subsequently managed to recover the girl from Qayyumabad neighbourhood of Korangi. A suspect was also arrested in this regard.
The investigation officer (IO) of the case, Mohammed Moin, told a local media outlet that police suspected that the girl had been kidnapped “with the ulterior motive of subjecting her to sexual assault”.
The officer said that police brought the girl to the Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Centre (JPMC) for a medical examination to ascertain whether she had been raped or not.
The IO said that he approached the police surgeon to arrange a female medico-legal officer (MLO) for the medical examination, but she [the officer] appeared reluctant to visit the hospital for assessment of the alleged rape victim.
JPMC Additional Police Surgeon Dr Sheeraz Ali Khowaja told a local media outlet that in rape cases, the victims’ families and IOs suffered immense difficulties due to an acute shortage of lady MLOs at government hospitals of the city.
The official said that he had written several letters to the authorities concerned, drawing their attention towards a lack of female doctors for post-mortem and medical examinations of women but so far no concrete steps have been taken by the health authorities to overcome this problem.
Dr Khowaja said that Mehmoodabad police brought the teenage girl to the hospital for a medical examination at 3:00 pm on Monday but her examination could not be conducted till the evening as no female MLO was available for the purpose.
