Pakistani police officer who caught rapist says wife, daughter ‘real heroes’
A Pakistani police officer who is being applauded for arresting a rape suspect, in an incident that sent shockwaves through the country earlier this month, is crediting his wife and daughter for being the “real heroes” in the case after they risked their lives to help him nab the criminal.
“They are my real heroes: My daughter and my wife. They did a noble job,” the officer, Mohammed Bux Buriro, told Arab News in an interview earlier this week.
The gruesome assault took place in the remote district of Kashmore, in the southern Sindh province of Pakistan, when a woman from Karachi — some 600 km away — arrived with her four-year-old daughter to take on a job offer by the alleged rapist, Rafiq Malak.
Malak, who was supposed to help her, locked and reportedly raped both of them for several days and only allowed the mother to leave after making her promise that she would bring him another woman. The fouryear-old was held hostage while he awaited her mother’s return.
Once free, the woman reported the crime. Buriro said he was sitting at his police station in Kashmore when she arrived “in tears” and narrated her ordeal.
Without hesitation, the assistant sub-inspector set out to find the woman’s child, even though it required putting at stake the lives of his own wife and daughter.
“I told my wife to trap him. I said to her, ‘If I’m home, I will guide you; otherwise keep talking to him,’” he said, as they established contact with the rapist.
The move was dangerous, also because the ultra-conservative tribal region bordering Balochistan and Punjab is notorious for honor killings.
“Our district has no policewomen, but even if there was one, I would not have put her life in danger,” Buriro said, explaining that a woman can be killed for merely speaking to a man who is not her family member.
“Ours is a dirty society in which a woman is viewed with dirty eyes; she is seen as inferior,” he said.
For two days, Buriro’s wife engaged Malak by talking to him on the phone but could not catch him. On the third day, on Nov. 9, their teenage daughter, Reshma, lured Malak into a trap by acting as bait. Reshma told the rapist that she would travel from Karachi and later meet him at a park in Kashmore. With Reshma in conversation with Malak, Buriro kept watch, ready to act.
He told Reshma that if Malak tried to flee, she must try and stop him. “When he asked her to remove her hijab, she grabbed his neck,” Buriro said.
His team members were at the scene and immediately arrested the man.
During the interrogation, the rapist disclosed the details of the location where he had hidden the child.
But when the officers began searching for the girl in different parts of the house, they could not trace her.
They finally managed to find her after Buriro saw her moving underneath a dirty cloth. He burst into tears when he realized it was the girl. “It was so difficult to see the child in that condition; my whole team was crying,” he said.