A Pakistani court on Thursday did not allow a Hindu girl to leave a shelter home and go with her parents despite medical tests confirming that she was 16 years old when forcibly abducted, converted to Islam and married to her abductor, in Pakistan’s Sindh province.
The girl was abducted two months ago from Sindh’s Hyderabad city and was recovered and sent to a safe home on October 20 after a court ruling.
The court ordered a medical examination to determine the girl’s age as her alleged husband submitted a marriage certificate showing that she was 19 years of age.
But medical tests confirmed she was 16 years old and underage.
The court ruled on Thursday that the girl will remain in a shelter home under the supervision of the local administration until the next hearing on October 31, as it needed to look further into the matter, much to the distraught of her parents.
On August 12, the girl, who worked in a mill with her elder sister, was returning home when four men abducted her from Fateh Chowk in Hyderabad.
She was forcibly converted to Islam and married to one of her kidnappers.
According to her parents and their lawyer, the police did not file a case until September after which police and human right officials recovered her from Balochistan province and brought her back to Hyderabad.
She was kept in a shelter home as her alleged husband filed a case against her parents.
The abduction and forcible conversion of young Hindu girls have become a major problem in the interior of Sindh province which has a large Hindu population in Thar, Umerkot, Mirpurkhas, Ghotki and Khairpur areas.
On July 16, 2019, the issue of abducting and forcibly converting Hindu girls in various districts of Sindh province was taken up in the Sindh Assembly, where a resolution was debated and unanimously passed after it was modified over objections of certain lawmakers that it should not be restricted to Hindu girls only.
But the bill which criminalised forcible religious conversions was later rejected by the assembly.
A similar bill was again proposed but rejected last year.