He had guaranteed her that she would thus give birth to a boy. A pregnant woman showed up at a Pakistani hospital with a nail driven into her head by a healer.
At first, the woman tried to remove the nail herself, but was unsuccessful, The Times of India reported. She therefore went to a hospital in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.
“She was fully conscious, but was in a lot of pain,” Dr. Haider Khan, who treated her, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
An x-ray showed the nail had been driven two inches into the skull. The brain, however, was not affected.
The police on the trail of the “sorcerer”
The patient said she was the mother of three daughters and was expecting another. In South Asia, having a boy is often seen as a good omen, as he is believed to be better able to secure his parents’ financial future than a girl.
“We will soon get our hands on the sorcerer,” Abbas Ahsan, police chief of Peshawar, told AFP.
Traditional healers, whose practices are often rooted in Sufi mysticism, are common in Pakistan, an overwhelmingly Muslim country, although various Islamic schools of thought disapprove of such rites.
