HARIPUR: A juvenile court here on Sep 23 rejected the bail petitions of three minors arrested on charges of kidnapping and killing a four-and-a-half-year-old girl.
The three accused were also named in the charge-sheet submitted by the police investigation wing, which placed their names in column No. 2 under Section 173 of the CrPC, declaring them innocent.
Police and counsel for the accused, Raja Yasir Kiyani, told Dawn that the court heard arguments from both sides before rejecting the bail pleas.
Complainant Mohammad Shafiq, father of the deceased, verbally consented to the acceptance of the bail petitions, saying he has no objection to the release of the three accused.
According to lawyer Kiyani, the complainant has also withdrawn from his earlier statement in which he had nominated the three minors for kidnapping, sexually assaulting and murdering his daughter.
Shafiq recorded a statement under Section 164 of the CrPC with Haripur’s judicial magistrate-I on Sept 16, exonerating the three accused. He told the court that he had been psychologically distressed when he initially accused them of abducting and killing his daughter.
In both statements, including the one recorded verbally before the court on Wednesday and the one given on September 16, the complainant directly accused a fourth suspect, aged 11 and a half years, of abducting, sexually assaulting and throwing the girl into a well.
After hearing the arguments, juvenile court judge and additional sessions judge-VI Haripur Shah Faisal rejected the bail petitions after considering the police’s findings in the charge-sheet, which had declared the three accused innocent.
On the evening of August 10, the four-and-a-half-year-old girl, the only child of Mohammad Shafiq, a daily wager at a bakery, went missing.
Her body was recovered on August 24 from a dry well at a warehouse a few yards from her home.
The police had arrested three suspects aged between 16 and 18 years.
One of them told a judicial magistrate that he and four other accused had abducted the girl and that two of them had sexually assaulted her. However, the accused didn’t disclose whether they had killed the girl or handed her over to someone else. The judicial magistrate sent the accused to jail on remand where they continue to be detained.
Meanwhile, after local political and social activists blocked a road in protest, police traced another minor suspect through CCTV footage and recovered the girl’s body on his pointation.
The complainant subsequently held the same suspect responsible for abducting and sexually assaulting the girl before pushing her into the dry well.
The postmortem report revealed fractures to the girl’s thigh bones and said she died from pain-induced trauma and excessive bleeding.
Families of the accused have alleged that police investigators subjected their minor children to third-degree torture to force them into confessing to abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering the girl.
Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2026.
