By Staff Reporter
LAHORE: Police have detained 15 people, including two women, as they pursue the men accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old Azerbaijani woman in Lahore, in a case that has drawn comparisons to the abduction and assault of two foreign tourists in the same neighbourhood barely two months earlier.
The woman, named in police documents as Diana, told officers she was approached by two unfamiliar women and taken to a café in the city’s Defence Housing Authority area on the night of 25 September, where three men were waiting. After the group spent time together, she said, the men offered to drive the women home but instead took her to an apartment, where she was given a drink laced with an intoxicating substance and lost consciousness.
According to the first information report lodged with Defence C police station, she was then raped repeatedly by three men over several hours before being left near Ghazi Interchange in the early hours of Saturday. She said her two mobile phones, including an iPhone, had been taken from her. Unable to reach anyone, she borrowed a phone from a passerby and called Pakistan’s police helpline.
Diana had arrived in Lahore roughly a fortnight earlier from Baku for work connected to the clothing trade, and had been staying in the Raiwind Road area of the city. Officers said she had visited Pakistan on previous occasions since March, travelling between Lahore and Faisalabad, and had stayed with different acquaintances during earlier trips. Investigators said she was able to converse in Urdu, which has aided the inquiry.
A case has been registered under sections of Pakistan’s penal code covering gang rape and causing hurt through poison, naming three suspects identified as Ahmed Tanveer, Ali and Mohsin, along with the two women who allegedly brought her to the café.
Syed Zeeshan Raza, the deputy inspector general of police for investigation in Lahore, said his officers had identified all those accused and recovered the vehicle used in the abduction — a white Hyundai Sonata reportedly registered to Tanveer — from a relative’s house. “We have identified all the accused. The vehicle used in the crime has been taken into custody,” he said, adding that raids were continuing “without pause” across every location linked to the suspects and that arrests were expected imminently. He declined to give further details of the men’s identities but said the case was “being monitored at the highest level”.
Raza set up a special investigation team under the Cantonment division’s Superintendent of Police, Asim Iftikhar, to lead the search. He said the inquiry would be carried out “on merit and in accordance with the law” and that he was personally overseeing its progress daily.
As the hunt for the named suspects continued, police widened their net to those suspected of shielding them. Three relatives of Tanveer and Mohsin were picked up from the Bahria Town and Defence areas on suspicion of helping the men evade capture, taking the total number detained for questioning to 15. Officers said the suspects’ names had been placed on an exit control list to prevent them fleeing the country, and that interrogation of the alleged facilitators was ongoing alongside a wider search using CCTV footage from the café, surrounding roads and commercial areas.
Diana has since undergone a medical examination, which police said had been completed and would help establish further evidence as the case progresses. Officers said she had not been in a position to give a full statement in the immediate aftermath of the alleged attack, and that a formal account would be recorded once she was able to provide one. Authorities said they had also put her in contact with the Azerbaijani embassy so she could receive consular support during the investigation.
The case has echoes of an assault reported in the same part of Lahore in July, when a Dutch woman and a Venezuelan woman were rescued after police said they had been abducted and held for ransom by an acquaintance and four accomplices. That case, too, involved allegations of repeated sexual assault and threats with weapons; the two women later gave statements accusing their captors of extorting them before they were freed following an emergency call placed by one victim’s father from Spain. Four suspects were subsequently arrested and remanded by a Lahore court, and the women returned home once the case had progressed through the courts.
The latest case has renewed scrutiny of the safety of foreign visitors to Lahore’s affluent Defence district, an area popular with expatriates and business travellers, and has prompted questions about how such attacks are being investigated and prevented. Police leadership has sought to project urgency, with Raza stressing that “those involved in this serious incident will face legal action without discrimination” and that no aspect of the case would be left unexamined.
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