Larkana Deputy Inspector General Nasir Aftab also confirmed the news, who added that Malak was shot dead by an accomplice as police drove him to one of the various suspected locations of Khairullah Bugti that he had identified earlier.
They said that he was taken along on the raid because he told them about Bugti’s location during the interrogation.
As security officers reached the RD-09 police station near Bakhshapur, Bugti opened fire at them from his hideout and killed Rafiq. Police were able to detain the second suspect, Shaikh said, and recovered weapons from his possession.
The SSP confirmed that Malak lost his life in the attack and that a police officer was also injured. Terrorism charges have now been added to the charge-sheet.
Earlier in the day, the Kashmore police arrested a second suspect in the gang-rape of a mother and her four-year-old daughter. The second arrest was also confirmed by SSP Amjad Shaikh. He said that Bugti was arrested in Balochistan’s Sui, where he fled after the rape. Malak was already in custody and had confessed to heinous crime.
In other developments in the case, the four-year-old victim’s condition has become critical once again and she was initially shifted from the Chandka Medical Hospital in Larkana to the Children Hospital’s Emergency Ward and later shifted via ambulance to Karachi. She is being shifted to the Aga Khan University Hospital with her mother, according to the CMH administration.
Earlier, an additional district and sessions court in Kashmore had granted Sindh police a three-day physical remand of the suspect.
The woman and her four-year-old daughter were allegedly gang-raped by a gang on Tuesday after being called on the offer of a job in Kashmore.
Reports suggest the woman was called in from Karachi for a job but when she reached there with her daughter, the assaulters allegedly gang-raped them and left them there for dead.
The FIR says that the woman was offered a job on October 25. She traveled there with the men and her four-year-old. The men then detained the pair at Malak’s residence in Kashmore and gang-raped the woman.
They then released her but kept her daughter, telling her to bring the woman who was with her during their meeting at the hospital in exchange for the child. They threatened to murder her daughter if the woman did not comply.
The woman approached the police in Kashmore, who conducted a raid at Malak’s residence, leading to the arrest. Malak had confessed to the crime after being arrested.
Another report citing sources said that the victim duo was subsequently sold off to some buyer where the police recovered them in a sensitive state.
The mother and daughter are now being provided with security, the Larkana district administration confirmed.
