The woman was attacked in September last year in front of her small children on the side of a motorway after her car ran out of fuel near the southern city of Lahore.
“They’ve both been handed the death penalty,” Chaudhry Qasim Arain, a lawyer for both men, told AFP after the verdict and sentencing hearing.The attack and the subsequent demands for better protection of women prompted the government to introduce new legislation, including the establishment of special courts to speed up rape trials and the chemical castration of serial rapists.
Pakistan is a deeply conservative nation where victims of sexual abuse often are too afraid to speak out and criminal complaints are frequently not investigated seriously.The country has an abysmal rape conviction rate, with official data putting it as low as 0.3 percent. Sheikh went on to say the woman — a resident of France — probably “mistook that Pakistani society is just as safe” as her home country.