Foreign women's abduction, rape case: Lahore court sends 4 suspects on 14-day judicial remand

LAHORE: A judicial magistrate at the Cantonment Courts granted police 14-day judicial remand of four suspects, including one related to a senior political figure, in a case of alleged kidnapping and rape of two foreign women.

One of those two women is a national of the Netherlands and the other of Venezuela, and a case of their alleged abduction and sexual assault was registered on July 2.

Subsequently, police had arrested four of the suspects and were initially granted their five-day physical remand on July 3. The suspects’ remand was extended twice in the following days, last on July 13.

They were produced before Judicial Magistrate Azhar Mahmood on Friday, following the expiry of their physical remand.

The investigating officer (IO) submitted a progress report before the court and requested that the suspects now be sent on judicial remand.

The magistrate accepted the request and sent the four suspects on judicial remand for 14 days.

During the hearing, the state prosecutor opposed a plea by the counsel of one of the suspects to discharge his client from the case, contending that he was accused of destroying evidence and aiding in the commission of the alleged offence.

At one point, Judge Mahmood noted that just one of the suspects was named in the first information report (FIR) while the rest were arrested after being identified by the two foreign women.

The case

When the case was first reported on July 2, it emerged that the father of one of the two foreign women had called the Police Emergency Helpline 15 and reported their alleged abduction and rape.

Lahore Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Operations Faisal Kamran had told Dawn that police subsequently dispatched a team of senior officials, recovered the women, arrested four suspects and registered an FIR.

The case had been registered under sections 375-A (rape) and 365-A (kidnapping for extortion) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

According to the case’s FIR, the women were abducted by five suspects, including a close relative of a senior political personality, who demanded ransom and subjected them to sexual assault during their captivity.

The suspects allegedly demanded $1.5 million in ransom before sexually assaulting them, the FIR said.

Victim testimony

Following the registration of the FIR, the recovered foreign women were later produced before a judicial magistrate at the Cantonment Courts to record their statements under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

According to the sworn statement of one of the women, she and her friend had arrived in Pakistan on June 26, 2026 at the invitation of a local business partner whom they said they had originally met in Singapore in October 2025.

The primary suspect, who claimed to be well-connected to influential government figures, arranged their visas under the guise of setting up meetings with high-profile investors for the victim’s company, the Dutch woman said.

After spending three days at a hotel in Islamabad — during which they made sightseeing trips to Nathia Gali and attended business presentations — the group travelled to Lahore by car on the afternoon of June 29.

The suspect allegedly lured the victim and her companion to a modern house in Lahore under the pretext of celebrating a relative’s birthday. However, upon entering the residence, they found it empty.

Within 15 minutes, four men armed with firearms and ropes stormed the premises. The captors immediately tied the victims’ hands behind their backs and subjected both women to physical assault, the complainant alleged.

While the primary suspect initially acted as a fellow victim to mask his complicity, it later became evident he was working in tandem with the armed group, she further claimed.

She alleged that the captors demanded exorbitant ransom amounts, starting at $2m, threatening to kill the women and sell their organs if they did not comply.

The victims were separated, the complainant said, recalling she was held downstairs under armed guard while her companion was kept upstairs.

During the night, she said, the prime suspect and an accomplice referred to as “the boss” forcibly took the victim’s phone and electronically transferred $17,000 in cryptocurrency from her accounts.

The woman said she was repeatedly coerced into sending frantic voice notes to her family and friends begging for money.

However, she managed to slip a pre-established distress code word—“CARLITOS”— into her messages, prompting her family in Europe to immediately alert international and local law enforcement authorities.

On June 30, she said, an armed assailant dressed in a black local suit sexually assaulted her in the bedroom.

On July 1, the key suspect drove the women away, claiming he was taking them to the airport, she said.

However, tracking the route on a hidden mobile phone, the Dutch woman said she realised he was deliberately lying and stalling, driving slowly while communicating suspiciously with “the boss”.

Fearing they were being driven to another secondary location, the women began screaming for him to stop. Seizing a moment of chaos when their vehicle slightly collided with a car ahead, the women jumped out of the moving vehicle and ran screaming into a nearby mechanic’s shop for safety, the woman said.

A local traffic police officer spotted the women and immediately summoned emergency backup, the Netherlands citizen said.

Suffering from severe trauma, the women initially panicked and fled the first police response vehicle out of fear.

However, senior police officials arrived shortly after alongside a female officer, successfully calming the victims and presenting evidence that law enforcement had actively been tracking their kidnapping case for the past 48 hours.

The victims were safely escorted to the police station, where their official statements were secured. ...