BAHAWALPUR:
A gruesome case of grave desecration has rocked Bahawalpur after the body of a 16-year-old girl was exhumed and desecrated in suburban Inayati.
Police said the main suspect, a self-styled practitioner of black magic, was later killed in a clash with police, while his accomplices remained at large.
The victim, Ramsha Bibi, died of electric shock and was buried Sunday evening in a local cemetery. However, when his family visited the grave the next morning, they found that the ground was disturbed and the body was missing.
The family alerted the Inayati police, who cordoned off the area and launched a search.
A police team later recovered the body from nearby agricultural fields, confirming that the grave had been dug overnight. Assistant sub-inspector Muhammad Kashif, district police spokesperson, said a post-mortem was conducted and evidence of gross defilement was found, leading to registration of a criminal case.
During the investigation, police identified Abdul Waheed, also known as Kala, a local resident known for allegedly practicing black magic, as the main suspect. He would have exhumed the body for occult purposes before throwing it in the neighboring fields.
Police said that after identifying Waheed and his accomplices, a raid was conducted to arrest them. However, the suspects opened fire on the group of police officers, forcing the officers into defensive positions. During the exchange of fire, Waheed was seriously injured, apparently by bullets fired by his own associates as he tried to flee.
He was rushed to hospital by emergency services 1122, where doctors pronounced him dead. The remaining suspects managed to escape in the darkness and search operations continue to apprehend them.
The incident has renewed public concern over a worrying trend of serious desecrations in different parts of the country. Over the past two years, at least a dozen similar cases have been reported across the country. In 2024, a man from the Korangi area of Karachi was arrested and confessed to exhuming and abusing four women’s bodies. In separate incidents in Rawalpindi and Lahore, the bodies of five children were found removed from graves and left exposed.
In 2025, a group of 12 people exhumed a body in the Dhamial area of Rawalpindi to move it for the construction of a shrine.
Legal expert Muhammad Furqan Abdullah told The Express PK Press Club that successive federal governments have tried to strengthen laws against such crimes since 2011.
He said a proposed Section 297-A under the Criminal Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024 seeks to increase penalties for exhumation and desecration of bodies and should be enacted without delay to serve as an effective deterrent.
Earlier in March 2022, a petition was filed in the Lahore High Court to end necrophilia through strict laws and policies.
Syeda Izzat Fatima, a lawyer, claimed in her petition that there had been many reported and unreported incidents in Pakistan where individuals were caught assaulting dead bodies, but there was no specific law to charge the culprits.
She cited an incident in which one Mohammad Riyaz was accused of assaulting 48 bodies in the town of Nazimabad, north of Karachi.
The petitioner said that Article 37 of the Constitution, which deals with “Promotion of social justice and eradication of social evils”, covered the act of necrophilia, which constituted a social evil not only towards the deceased but also towards their families. She explained that many families were reluctant to bury their female members in cemeteries and most continued to protect the graves for months, fearing that the deceased would also become victims of this heinous act.
