Police have arrested some people after a pregnant woman set herself on fire and later died after she was raped in revenge by a man on the orders of a panchayat in Dhillu Gharbi village of Gujrat district.
The woman passed away at Lahore’s Mayo Hospital.
The sources said the woman was brought to the Mayo Hospital in a critical condition. Before her death, she gave birth to a stillborn baby at the hospital.
Gujrat District Police Officer Sohail Zafar Chattha told media that the superintendent of police in Bhimber sent a letter to the Gujrat police on Nov 7, informing them that a woman had attempted suicide by setting herself on fire at her in-laws’ house in Bhimber district on Oct 18 and she later died in a hospital in Lahore.
He said the woman’s father, the minor girl’s father and some members of the panchayat had been taken into custody after registration of a case against them on Nov 10.
However, he added, the matter took a new turn when parents of the deceased woman, all the suspects in the case and some people in the village denied that any meeting of the Panchayat had been held and that the woman was raped by the minor girl’s father.
The sources said the police were in search of body of the stillborn baby, who had either been buried somewhere in Lahore or thrown away somewhere after the premature delivery, in order to get a DNA report to establish whether or not the minor girl’s father was the biological father of the baby.
They said it was not clear who had removed the body from the Mayo Hospital.
The husband of the woman had produced a piece of cloth from the garbage dump at the hospital in which, he claimed, the stillborn baby had been kept after the premature delivery.
Earlier, a panchayat in Gujarat city asked a man whose minor daughter was raped to rape the daughter of the assaulter in revenge for the crime.
The woman was married and pregnant. In a statement she gave to the police from her death bed, the woman said she was raped on the orders of a panchayat.
