Three Pakistani border policemen remanded to police over rapes of five young wom en 16 June, 2012 MULTAN, Pakistan

A Pakistani court on Monday remanded three border policemen accus ed of raping five young women and filming the attack, officials said. The women, aged 15 to 21, said they were taken from a picnic resort to a police station in the town of Dera Ghazi Khan, 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the capi tal Islamabad, where they were raped. "The court remanded the three policemen into custody until June 14," said Tariq Basra, of the Border Military Police. "We are waiting for the medical report to ascertain whether (an) allegation of r ape is true or false," Basra told AFP. The alleged attack, which the women said was filmed by the officers according to investigators, took place last Thursday. After the women went to the police, the accused took refuge with tribal elders, who handed them back to police late Sunday, said district administrator, Iftikha r Ali Sahu. The court on Monday also refused to allow the girls to return to their parents, saying that they are instead in the custody of administration officials. "These girls will be produced before the court again on Tuesday enabling the jud ge to verify the identity of the parents, guardians," Basra told AFP. Rape is notoriously difficult to prosecute in Pakistan, where women are often tr eated as second-class citizens. In April 2011, the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of five men sentenced to d eath in Pakistan's most famous rape case, that of Mukhtar Mai. Mai was gang raped in 2002 on the orders of a village council as punishment, aft er her brother, who was aged just 12 at the time, was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan. A local court had sentenced six men to death, but a higher court acquitted five of them in March 2005, and commuted the sentence for the main accused, Abdul Kha liq, to life imprisonment. According to the independent women's rights group Aurat Foundation, more than 80 0 women were raped in Pakistan in 2011.