Pakistani Police Jailed For Parading Adulterous Couple Naked Through Streets

Three policemen in Pakistan have been jailed and suspended from the force after they made an unmarried couple who had allegedly engaged in sex to march naked through the streets of the town of Gambat.

According to reports, the adulterous couple were frog-marched for more than a mile on their way to the police station in this city in the southeastern Pakistani province of Sindh.

Mobile phone footage of the incident shows the police beating the man.

When some onlookers complained, police allowed the woman into their police vehicle, but forced the man to continue walking nude in front of the car.

BBC identified the man as Mumtaz Mirbahar, 52, who said he was "deeply scarred" by the humiliation. Mirbahar has been released on bail, but the unidentified woman remains in jail.

“They were abusing me as they made us walk,” Mirbahar told BBC. “The woman was pleading with them, ‘You have mothers and sisters of your own. Please let me get dressed.’”

The couple were apparently arrested during a police raid in a suspected brothel, answering complaints by neighbors of loud parties taking place during the holy month of Ramadan.

Ifran Baloch, the local police chief, told reporters the policemen could face prosecution.

"If the cops accused of such inhuman treatment towards the couple were found guilty, they will not be spared," he said.

Such public humiliation of sex offenders is quite common in Pakistan – but what makes this case unusual is that it was filmed by a mobile phone.

But walking nude in public may be the least of the couple’s problems.

Under the ‘Zina laws’ of Pakistan, fornication and adultery are considered “crimes against the state” and are theoretically punishable by death. However, the death sentences is rarely carried out in such cases.

Still, sometimes executions are performed by extra-judicial elements.

In the summer of 2007, a woman and three men were shot to death by Pakistani villagers after a local tribal council found them guilty of having committed adultery.

The incident took place in the Khyber agency, a semi-autonomous region near the Afghan border.