‘Clothes torn, tossed in air’: Pakistan woman assaulted by mob on I-Day

Pakistan was shaken by an incident on its independence day on August 14 when a woman and her six companions were brutally attacked and robbed by a mob near Minar-e-Pakistan, the symbol of national pride, in Lahore, according to reports. 

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A video of the incident has gone viral on social media with users expressing anger over the actions of the men in the video. According to reports, a woman TikToker has alleged that her clothes were torn and she was tossed into the air by hundreds of people who also assaulted her.

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In an FIR lodged at the Lorry Adda police station, the complainant said that she along with her six companions were filming a video near Minar-e-Pakistan on Independence Day on Saturday when around 300 to 400 people “attacked” them, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported.

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The group tried to escape but was outnumbered. Their money was stolen and the woman’s jewellery was snatched. “The crowd was huge and people were scaling the enclosure and coming towards us. People were pushing and pulling me to the extent that they tore my clothes. Several people tried to help me but the crowd was too huge and they kept throwing me in the air,” she said, according to PTI. “The unidentified persons assaulted us violently,” she added.

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The Lahore police has registered a case against hundreds of unidentified persons for the assault at the city’s Greater Iqbal Park. Lahore DIG Operations Sajid Kiyani said that those responsible will not be spared. 

Earlier, a rape in September 2020 on a motorway had shaken the nation. A Pakistani-French woman and her two children were stranded on a motorway when two men broke into their car, which had run out of petrol on the road near Lahore, robbed them and raped the woman in front of her children.

Both men were sentenced to death.

What led to outrage was senior police official Umer Sheikh’s comment that implied that she had been partly to blame. He questioned why she had not taken a busier road, given that she had been alone with her children, or checked her fuel before departing, reports bbc.