The incident took place in Fasilabad's Bawa Chak market on Monday. A First Information Report (FIR) was registered by the police against the five identified and ten unidentified suspects.
The suspects have been charged under sections 354-A (assault or use of criminal force against a woman and stripping her), 509 (insulting modesty or causing sexual harassment), 147 (punishment for rioting), and 149 (unlawful assembly guilty of an offence committed in prosecution of common object) of the Pakistan Penal Code.
The tragic event happened when four women went to Bawa Chak Market on Monday to collect garbage. The women entered a shop and asked the owner for water to drink but instead he accused them of theft and started beating them. Upon hearing the commotion the other suspects also came to the site and together they stripped the women and dragged them through the market.
The complainant said in the FIR that she and the three other women were tortured for an hour. She pleaded that strict action should be taken against the accused.
This is not the first time that such an incident has taken place in the country. Earlier, this year three men in Dera Ismail Khan stripped naked a woman, in a street full onlooker, because of her husband’s alleged relationship with their sister.
Incidents of assault against women, in the country, came to prominence in 2002 when Mukhtaran Mai became the victim of a gang-rape sanctioned by a tribal council of the local Mastoi Baloch clan.