Are the relevant authorities to the Milat Express incident investigating Maryam’s death in the right direction when railway staff is already in the limelight for raping women? This is a question cum hope when there is another video of the deceased being viral making noise and raising hands along with her children.
The earlier video of the deceased circulated on social media showed a railway police official torturing Maryam and her children in the Millat Express on April 7. This video brought this case to light after which Maryam was also found dead at a railway station in Bahawalpur district. Earlier Pakistan Railway in its statement said that the police official who is under arrest in a case of misbehaving with the deceased was to remain on duty from Karachi to Hyderabad. If this statement of the Railway is true then it raises more questions. Such as how the dead body was found at Bahawalpur when the woman was made the victim of torture or an alleged rape before the official ended his duty and gets down the board in Hyderabad?
Bahawalpur is about 345 miles away from the last point of the official’s duty- Hyderabad. How a woman could jump from the train after 345 miles away from the place where she was made victim? Isn’t it leading towards the involvement of some people in this incident? Or isn’t it revealing something like this that the woman was killed earlier and then was thrown down from the train? As for the mental condition of the deceased is concerned, hopefully the investigation team will also be checking it was it was first journey of her from Karachi to Faisalabad or she had travelled before with that mental condition.
The Railway has claimed that the deceased was mentally retorted while the statements of her family negate this impression. Anyway, so far, the postmortem report has revealed that Maryam died because of bone fractures and excessive bleeding. The investigation team will get examinations of the deceased with regard to the possibility of rape or death before being found on the railway track or she was forced to jump is actually the business of the investigation team and hopefully it will be talking all this into account.
However, it has been reported that the committee formed by Inspector General (IG) Railways Rao Sardar has not yet completed the inquiry in this regard. The inquiry committee has recorded the statements of two passengers and the constable, but the statement of woman’s brother Afzal has not been recorded yet. The brother of the deceased woman has been reported to said that her sister was raped and was pushed from the moving train by constable Amir Ali who is already being investigated and is under arrest.
Meanwhile, IG PRP has said that the matter is being investigated in all directions and action will be taken in light of the inquiry report. However, it is important mention here that this case Milat Express is first of its kind. Earlier in a dreadful incident a girl was raped at the Okara railway station by a Railway staffer named Haseeb in 2023. The rape victim registered a complaint against the railways’ staff at the Karachi police station. Similarly, another woman was gang-raped by two ticket-checkers and their in-charge on board in the Bahaudin Zakariya Express. This shocking incident happened on May 27, 2022 when the victim hailing from Orangi Town-Karachi boarded from Multan railway station for Karachi and was gang raped. In this incident ticket-checkers -Zahid and Aqib – shifted the victim to an AC compartment of the train and raped her. Adding to the miseries all such incidents have taken place on the Karachi bound trains.
Anyway, as far the Milat Express incident is concerned, deceased Maryam boarded on this train from Karachi and was coming to Faisalabad on April 7 to celebrate Eidul Fitr. She belonged Chak 648 GB of district Jaranwala. According to her brother -Afzal- she was buried in the village on April 9 as it was said that she died in a train accident. He said that Bahawalpur police informed the family that Maryam was found dead.
(Senior journalist Rana Kashif has authored this piece)
