Mukhtaran Mai filed a review petition on Thursday against the Supreme Court verdict rejecting her appeal by a majority of two to one against the acquittal of men accused of raping her almost nine years ago. Mukhtaran, now 40, was gang raped in June 2002 on the orders of a village council as punishment after her younger brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan.
The boy was just 12 years old at the time of the incident in Meerwala town in central Multan district, some 360 kilometres (225 miles) southwest of the capital Islamabad. The criminal review petition, filed through Aitzaz Ahsan, contended that the judgement was inherently flawed and set a dangerous precedent for times to come, thus it needed to be reviewed.
It said the long standing principle of law relating to ‘common intention’ had escaped the attention of the judges in majority and their conclusion. A local anti-terrorism court previously sentenced six men to death, but the Lahore High Court acquitted five of them in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Khaliq, to life imprisonment.
