(The Telegraph) A Christian girl has been taken into care in Pakistan after allegedly being abducted by a Muslim man who forced her marry him and kept her chained up in a cattle pen.
The girl spent five months chained up in the pen in the yard of her 45-year-old captor’s home, where she was forced to work all day clearing the animals’ dung, her family claim.
They said that when rescued by police last month, she had cuts on her ankles left by the shackles put on her by captor, who is also said to have raped her repeatedly.
The case has now been taken up by human rights groups, who say the family’s initial complaint to police went ignored for three months. They claim that every year, hundreds of girls from Pakistan’s Christian and Hindu minority groups are abducted and forced into Muslim marriage, with the justice system often turning a blind eye for fear of offending Islamic hardliners.