3 Kasur men arrested for alleged sexual assault of teenage boy for nearly three years – Pakistan

Police arrested three suspects for the alleged sexual assault, filming and blackmail of a teenager in the city of Pattoki in the Kasur district of Punjab, authorities said Tuesday.

The three suspects were nominated in a First Information Report (FIR) on Sunday and were arrested by a police team the next day.

Two others are also nominated in the police report. According to Kasur SP's investigation, Mirza Abdul Quddoos Baig, police efforts are underway to arrest the two remaining suspects.

According to the FIR, recorded in a complaint by the victim's father, the teenager had been "continually subjected to sodomy at gunpoint and blackmail for each of the five suspects in the past two and a half years."

It is not clear if the five suspects had any link between them. According to the police, the suspects would not extort money from the victim, as had been the case when a child pornography ring was discovered four years ago in the Hussain Khanwala village of Kasur.

The boy said that the suspects would film the act and threaten to comply with their requests or risk having the images uploaded to social networks.

According to law enforcement officials, one of the defendants has also been named in a separate FIR filed by another complainant on Monday.

In the other FIR, the plaintiff has claimed that his brother was also subjected to sexual assault by the same suspect.

The suspect, a friend of the complainant, had cheated the victim on the pretext of "going to a birthday party" three months ago, according to the police report.

Then, the victim was raped and threatened to remain silent about the incident "for her own good."

After being again approached and blackmailed by the suspect, the victim finally informed his brother of the incident on Sunday and then a complaint was filed the next day.

The development comes days after the arrest of the alleged serial killer behind the murders of four minor children in the Kasur Chunian tehsil.

Four children, aged 8 to 12, had disappeared since June of this year and the last, Faizan, aged 8, disappeared the night of September 16.

The remains of three of them were found on September 17 in the sand dunes near the Chunian bridge.

In recent years, Kasur has been shaken by multiple incidents of abuse, rape and murder of children. In January 2018, Zainab Ansari, six, was found dead in a pile of garbage near Shahbaz Khan Road, five days after her disappearance. It was the twelfth incident of this type that occurred within a 10-kilometer radius in Kasur for a period of 12 months. His death had caused protests and outrage throughout the country.

The first suspect, Imran Ali, had been arrested on January 23, 2018 and on June 12 the Supreme Court rejected his appeal against the death sentence, noting that he had admitted to committing similar crimes with eight other minor victims. Ali was subsequently executed in October of last year.

In 2015, the district's Hussain Khanwala village attracted worldwide attention when a child pornography ring was stopped. Hundreds of video clips have emerged showing a gang forcing dozens of younger children to perform sexual acts and film them. The gang also used the videos to blackmail the children's families and extort millions of cash and jewelry.