UZAFFARGARH, Pakistan, July 5 (Reuters) — A Pakistani woman said today that she had begged for mercy as four men dragged her to a room and raped her on the order of a village jury, but none of the hundreds of bystanders would help her.
The woman and her father said no one from the crowd dared to object to the verdict of the traditional jury of village elders because they feared for their lives. "They kept dragging me toward the room," the woman said, speaking in a television interview from Muzaffargarh, a town near Meerwala, her home village in the central province of Punjab. "My father, uncle and myself begged for mercy from them and the people sitting there but no one came to our help."
The police said today that they had arrested one of the four suspects in the rape and were hunting for the others. The incident, in which the woman was raped as a punishment for what the jury said was a sexual relationship her brother had with a girl of a high-class tribe, has set off an outcry throughout Pakistan. The brother's age is now in dispute, with one report saying he is only 11.
The Pakistani government has vowed to pursue the case and on Thursday gave the victim a check for about $8,200.
"They raped me for one hour and afterward I was unable to move," the woman said in the television interview. "After one hour, I called my father and uncle to take me home."
The woman's father said, "We begged for mercy in the name of God, but they held guns on us and we were helpless."
The rape occurred on June 22, but was registered as a complaint by the police only about a week later.
Local newspaper reports had originally said the woman was 18, but the Punjab provincial police chief, Malik Asif Hayat, told the Supreme Court she is 30.
"I would have committed suicide if the government had not come to my help," the woman told Pakistan's women's development minister, Attiya Inayatullah, who gave her the check.
Ms. Inayatullah said the government was considering setting up a summary court to deliver quick punishment to those responsible for the rape.
Newspaper reports said today that another young girl of the same area committed suicide a few days ago after being raped. The authorities have confirmed the report.
A recent report issued by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan, but it said most sexual assaults went unreported because of the social stigma attached to such charges and the difficulty in proving them. In Punjab a woman is raped every six hours and a woman is gang-raped every four days, yet only 321 rape cases were reported to the police last year, the report said.