Pak border police charged with rape at check post - Zee News

Islamabad: Three personnel of Pakistan's Border Military Police force and two civilians have been accused of raping five women after stopping their car at a check post for routine check in Punjab province. All the policemen have denied the charges but are absconding.

The incident took place at the border force police station Fort Munro, 85 km from Dera Ghazi Khan, one of the most populous cities in the province, Geo News reported.

The five women hail from Lahore and were visiting Dera Ghazi Khan, said Border Military Police commander Tariq Basra.

The women identified the officials as Amjad Ali, Muhammad Zafar and Naveed Iqbal. They said there was one civilian named Majeed Leghari as well as an unidentified fifth man.

The accused policemen told Geo News from an unknown location that they were innocent and were willing to turn themselves in if the government agreed to the condition of a fair trial.

Three of the policemen said it was nothing more than an attempt to settle a score over a spat that took place at the check-post where they had stopped a car.

"We stopped a car for routine checking, but the occupants of the vehicle -- five girls and two men -- refused to cooperate with us, forcing us to take stricter measures," said one of the accused policemen.

He said he and his fellow officers were only trying to ensure the standard operating procedures, but the people in the car had no respect for the law of the land.

"Irked by our persistence, the two men climbed down the car and tried to pick a fight with us. We somehow brought the situation under control and the violators went away fuming, that too without showing any ID or letting us frisk them or check their vehicle," the policeman said.

Claiming innocence, he said all the accused were shocked when they saw media reports about the rape.

They offered to produce themselves before any court if a fair trial is promised.

Another media report said three police officials and two of their accomplices allegedly gang raped five women tourists from Lahore and Bahawalpur at the Fort Munro hill station on Saturday.

Police said three officials of the Fort Munro border military police -- responsible for maintenance of law and order in the tribal belt -- stopped a vehicle carrying five women and a man on Thursday night on the pretext of checking.

The women told police they were kidnapped by the border policemen and taken to a private house where they were gang raped by three police officials -- Ali, Zafar and Iqbal -- the civilian Majeed Leghari and an unidentified fifth man.

They said they were freed on Friday morning, and reached Dera Ghazi Khan and filed a police complaint.

A case was filed on the complaint of Asif Imran, the fiancé of one of the women.

The five women would be presented before a judicial magistrate on Monday to record their statement.

President Asif Ali Zardari and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif have ordered the Dera Ghazi Khan commissioner to submit a detailed report in this connection.

IANS

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Targeted attack: Police officer killed in Peshawar roadside blast - The Express Tribune

A police party on routin­e patrol­ling was target­ed by the roadsi­de blast. A police official was killed and another injured in an explosion that targeted a police patrol in Charsadda. PHOTO: MUHAMMAD IQBAL/EXPRESS

PESHAWAR: 

A police officer was killed, while another was injured, after a roadside bomb exploded on Charsadda Road in Peshawar on Monday evening.

Officers told The Express Tribune that police personnel, including those from the community police, were on a routine patrol within the remits of Khazana Police Station when the explosion occurred, injuring two policemen.

One of the men, Javed, died after reaching the hospital.

DSP Riazul Islam told The Express Tribune that it was a powerful explosion which targeted a police patrol. “Police officer Gulzar is injured, but he is out of danger,” he said, adding that Javed was from the
community police and had been hired on a two-year contract.

Police cordoned off the area and commenced a search operation.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 1st, 2012.

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Pakistan Police Defuse Passenger Train Bomb - Naharnet

Pakistani police defused a bomb on a passenger train in the country's northwest on Wednesday, officials said, hours after a blast at a station in the eastern city of Lahore killed two people.

A guard found the bomb in a briefcase in the early hours of the morning on the train from Karachi to Peshawar, the main town in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghan border.

"The bomb fitted with detonator and batteries was packed with old clothes in a briefcase lying unattended in one of the coaches of the Awam Express," police officer Mazhar Abbas told Agence France Presse.

The train guard found the briefcase after a wedding party got down from the train at Attock station, he said.

"The guard checked from the wedding party members and remaining passengers in the coach but nobody claimed its ownership."

A bomb disposal squad was then summoned who defused the device, he said.

Mohammed Sajjad, a police investigation official, told AFP the bomb carried 13 kilograms of explosives as well as ball bearings and some nuts and bolts.

"Luckily a major tragedy has been averted," he added.

At least two people were killed on Tuesday when a bomb exploded near the waiting lounge of a luxury train at the main railway station in Lahore.

Pakistan suffers frequent attacks blamed on Taliban and al-Qaida-linked militants, who are most active in the lawless tribal belt in the northwest of the country on the border with Afghanistan.

Islamist militants have killed more than 4,900 people across Pakistan since government troops raided an extremist mosque in Islamabad in July 2007.

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