Pakistani teenager "raped", paraded over "honour"

KARACHI, Jan 31 (Reuters) A group of Pakistani men has been accused of raping a teenaged girl and forcing her to parade naked through her village because one of her relatives eloped with a young woman from the men's family, police said today.

Such attacks, known as honour crimes because they are committed in response to a perceived slight on a family's honour, are common in predominantly Muslim Pakistan, especially in backward, rural communities.

Police said the girl's father had filed a complaint on Saturday in Ubaro town, 530 km from the city of Karachi, saying a group of 11 men had kidnapped his daughter, raped her and forced her to parade naked.

The father told police the men were furious because the girl's cousin had eloped with and married a young woman from their family.

''Some villagers have said the girl was raped and her clothes torn off,'' investigating police officer Aftab Farooqi told Reuters.

''They also claim she was forced to walk half naked in the village streets before some older woman covered her with a blanket,'' he said.

The girl is in hospital in Ubaro, police said.

Another senior police official, Mushtaq Khoso, said police had arrested four of the 11 men named in the complaint and police were awaiting a medical report to confirm the 16-year-old had been raped.

Another police officer said certain influential people were pressing the girl's father to drop his complaint.

The case brings to mind a similar attack on a village woman in 2002.

The woman, Mukhtaran Mai, was gang-raped on the orders of a traditional village council in Punjab province as punishment because her brother had had a relationship with a young woman without the approval of her family.

Mai pressed charges against her attackers and rose to international prominence as a women's rights campaigner.

Mai's case highlighted Pakistan's laws on rape and helped galvanise public opinion behind a government-backed change to Islamic laws, approved late last year, that makes it easier for women to seek justice in civil courts.

Under the old Islamic law on rape, a woman risked prosecution for adultery unless she could produce four male witnesses to a rape.

REUTERS BDP PM1422