Pakistan arrests 5 for rape evoking cause celebre

KARACHI, Oct 20 (Reuters) Pakistani police have arrested five men accused in a gang-rape case that has evoked comparisons with Mukhtaran Mai, a Pakistani rape victim who has become an icon for international womens' rights groups.

The men, accused of raping a 24-year-old university student in the same part of the central province of Punjab where Mai was raped, had their bail applications rejected by a court yesterday and were taken into custody, Rashid Rehman of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission told Reuters.

The woman and her mother, who was also abducted with her in August, had named 13 assailants. A total of six men are in custody, and the others have absconded, Rehman said.

The accused were said to have carried out the rape in retaliation for one of their own womenfolk eloping with a relative of the student, who belongs to a low caste family in a village 40 km outside the city of Multan.

Mai, an uneducated village woman whose autobiography "In the Name of Honour" is expected to be released next month, was gang-raped on the orders of a village council that decided her 12-year-old brother had had illicit relations with a woman of a higher caste.

Mai's fight for justice in her male-dominated society prompted an outcry at home and abroad, and eventually her assailants were arrested.

Women in rural Pakistan are often victims of family feuds, tribal revenge or male violence, but because of migration such cases are cropping up in urban areas too.

Pakistan is often embarrassed by its record on crimes against women, and for the past few months the government has been struggling to amend laws that provide rapists with an easy loophole while leaving victims open to prosecution for adultery.

The crime of rape falls under the ambit of Pakistan's parallel Islamic legal code, which stipulates that rape victims need four male victims to prove they've been raped.

The government is trying to switch the crime to the criminal code, but it has run into fierce resistance from Islamist opposition parties and religious conservatives.

Reuters BDP DS1623