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| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistani Politician Says Rival Beat Her |
| 2002-12-15 |
| A female council member says she was beaten and paraded naked through the streets of her small Pakistani town by a political rival and his supporters, authorities said Sunday. Police arrested Chaudhry Mohammed Alam, his two sons and another man on Saturday after the woman issued a formal complaint, police officer Saeed Akhtar told The Associated Press. These are the people who want to impose their system on the rest of the world... The woman, Nasim Akhtar, says she was attacked on Dec. 7 in the eastern town of Sadra Bara after she used a loudspeaker to call on Alam to donate money for repairs of a religious site. The town is 140 miles east of the capital, Islamabad. Attacks against women are common in remote and deeply conservative parts of Pakistan. That definition seems to cover most places, to include downtown Karachi... Nasim Akhtar told the Islamabad-based daily The News that she was beaten for two hours and dragged naked through the streets of the village as townsfolk looked on from streets and nearby rooftops. She said that the men were armed with sticks and that nobody dared try to rescue her. After the attack, Nasim Akhtar said she was threatened with death if she reported it to police. She said Alam and his followers also tried to prevent her from going to a hospital. If the witnesses are all dead, then there was no crime... Alam has acknowledged taking offense at the call to donate money - seen as a public challenge to Alam, a prominent landlord in the town - but he denied he or the others beat or humiliated the woman, said the police officer, Saeed Akhtar, who is no relation to the council member. "No! No! Certainly not! A pious fellow like me? Pshaw!" Nasim Akhtar, a widow in her 40s and mother of seven, and Alam, who is in his 70s, are apparently political rivals whose enmity goes back years. I.A. Rehman, a human rights commission leader, said the group was sending a team of investigators to the town to look into the incident. ``It is shocking, of course, but unfortunately, we cannot say we are surprised,'' Rehman told AP. ``In Pakistan, local despots take the law into their own hands, and for them, even if a woman has become a town councilor, she is still just a woman and vulnerable to abuse.'' They hate it when the breeding stock gets uppity. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |