Police in Pakistan are attempting to trace hundreds of men in order to prosecute them over the mass sexual assault of a woman in a park in Lahore.

Officers are using CCTV footage to identify up to 400 men seen attacking and robbing the young woman who was filming a TikTok video in the city’s Greater Iqbal park.

“We are working on it full throttle,” Fawad Chaudhry, Pakistan’s information minister, said. He added that Imran Khan, the prime minister, is keeping tabs on developments after the incident sparked outrage.

The woman has filed complaints against between 300 and 400 individuals, according to the case file.

In a statement to police, she said: “The crowd pulled me from all sides to such an extent that my clothes were torn. I was hurled in the air. They assaulted me brutally.”

In her filing the woman also claimed the men stole her money, earrings and phone.

The incident took place in broad daylight on Pakistan’s Independence Day while the woman was out filming a video for TikTok with two friends. It is unclear how the assault began, but in footage taken from the scene, the crowd can be seen tearing at her clothes, throwing her around and groping her.

Pakistanis on social media voiced their disgust at the incident, saying it highlights the country’s pervasive misogynistic culture.

The hashtag “yes all men” was trending, a rebuttal to the phrase “not all men” that is often used by males in response to incidents of sexual violence against women.

One Twitter user asked why no one stood up for the woman: “Not all men right? Just 400 men in the smack middle of Lahore groping one single woman. Together. Not one of them protected her. But yes not all men!”

“Are #400MEN still not enough for the people of this country to finally convince themselves and their misogynistic & sick mindset about how wrong they are about ‘not all men’?” wrote another.

Mr Khan has been criticised for suggesting that a rise in sexual violence has been fuelled by how women dress and behave.

“If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact on the men unless they are robots,” he said in an interview in June. “If you raise temptation in society to a point – and all these young guys have nowhere to go – it has a consequence in society.”

Pakistan is consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous places in the world for women. A study by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2018 named it the sixth most dangerous nation for females, with neighbour India in first place. (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]