There has been uproar on social media since Tuesday night about a woman being gang-raped, allegedly on the premises of one of Pakistan’s biggest manufacturer and exporter of garments and textile products. By morning Wednesday, it morphed into a viral trend with tens of thousands of mentions and retweets across social media platforms.

Aaj Digital took a closer look at the developments and found the following widely-shared text that appears to be the basis of claim and the resultant viral trend. The text is reproduced below:

“A girl was drugged and r/ped all night long by 20-22 men from the HR department M4 Unit of Artistic Milliners. TWENTY MEN. Not a single news channel has investigated it or reported it. No one knows if she is dead or alive.”

The post was accompanied with the hashtag #ArtisticMillinersRapeCase, which became a viral trend in a matter of hours.

A quick Google search in the night showed the news to have been reported on sites of dubious origin. It was still too early even for digital platforms to pick up the news. However, quite a few people were writing about it on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

This included one user, who is believed to be the earliest people to have shared the information, with her tweet widely shared and retweeted.

The user also shared the same update on her LinkedIn account.

In her post, the user said that the girl had been murdered. However, as with previous posts, there was no mention of the date of the incident, of how the case came to light, who was the victim and where was the body. Aaj Digital tried to contact the user through social media but did not receive any response.

The response to her posts resulted in others claiming to have heard the story. However, most responses and testimonies were based on hearsay.

Around that same time, some users on social media cited the recovery of a body from a park in the Korangi area a few days earlier. They claimed that she was the woman who had been gang-raped and murdered. Some users shared the horrifying video of Chippa workers taking the body. Chippa Ambulance Service told Aaj Digital that no heirs had come forward to claim the body despite the passage of a week.

DIG East Muqaddas Haider denied the reports of the gang-rape and murder taking place at the texitle industry. He said that the police investigation revealed the involvement of unsavoury elements who were trying to blackmail the company.

Artistic Milliners is one of the top denim importers of the company. It operates 14 units in Karachi, where around 20,000 people work. “We employ around 10,000 women at our units,” said Mudassir Karim, the group general manager for administration and security told Aaj Digital. “Do you think such an incident could be buried at a company where women are such an essential component of the workforce?”

Meanwhile, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Korangi Faisal Bashir, in a September 4 letter that has since been shared on social media, said that no evidence was found of the claims made by ‘web channel Dhoom Plus’.

“It was an attempt to defame the reputation of the compaby by Sagar Buledi and member of Sindh Sajagi Labour Federation, who is operating fake Dhoom Plus channel on Facebook,” it said.

The response from SSP Korangi was in response to a letter by the Korangi Association of Trade and Industry (KATI), which had notified the police of the ‘defamation campaign’.

The letter from KATI is dated August 31. It is the same date when the body was found in a park in Korangi, which would later be connected to the alleged gang rape at the textile giant’s unit. Aaj Digital contacted the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre to find out whether any such cases hadn’t been brought to the hospital in the last week but did not receive a response by the time the report was published.

Artistic Milliners have issued a statement, saying that the incident had been investigated including by the provincial labour department.

Captain Karim said that the police visited their premises on September 3, during which they spoke to the workers - including women - at the plant and also reviewed CCTV footage.

He added that some people with malicious intent wanted to defame the company, and they have forwarded the complaint to the cybercrime cell of the Federal Investigation Agency.

At the same time, another video started doing the rounds, in which a woman claims that she was a worker at the same company and had faced harassment in the past. In the 2 minute 50 second video, the woman said that she had been working at a textile factory for over a decade. She then goes on to name several people.

However, at the start of the video the woman say she says that she works at Artistic Garment Industries (AGI), which is a separate group. The owners of Artisitc Milliners and AGI group are brothers. It was later revealed that the video was one year old.