Aasia Bibi last saw her eight-year-old daughter Laiba as she waved her off on her way to a Quran class in July 2017. She did not return for dinner.
That night, when Aasia heard a girl had been found dead, she felt her legs weaken and her body convulse.
"I was heading towards where they said they'd found the body. I couldn't walk, I was praying to God, saying, 'please, please, please don't let it be my daughter,'"
It was.
On Tuesday, authorities in the Pakistani city of Kasur in eastern Punjab province announced they'd arrested a 24-year-old man, named only as Imran, who is accused of attacking and raping eight girls under the age of 11.
"The first phase of our investigation is now over. We have arrested this horrific creature," Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif said at a press conference Tuesday.
The alleged killer's first victim was found dead in Kasur two years ago. The last was seven-year-old Zainab Ansari whose body was found dumped on a garbage heap, 100 meters from her home in the city center earlier this month.
Zainab's disappearance on January 4 led to a frantic search of the city by police and members of the public.
The young girl's body was found on January 9, five days after she disappeared. A post-mortem report said she had been sexually abused and strangled.
Zainab's death amplified the cries of desperate parents for police to catch a killer they feared was preying on children.
Television screens played and replayed closed-circuit television video showing a girl identified as Zainab being led away, hand in hand with a man police said could be her killer.
Angry locals demanded answers; violent riots erupted and two protesters died.
Amid the outcry, Punjab Chief Minister Sharif ordered police to arrest the girl's killer or killers within 24 hours, and offered a 10 million Pakistani rupee bounty (over $90,000) for anyone who helped find those responsible.
On January 15, Punjab government spokesman Malik Muhammad that DNA recovered from Zainab's body matched that found on several other suspected victims who were apparently abducted within a four- to five-kilometer (two- to three-mile) radius area of the city.
He said authorities had discovered a DNA link after the fourth attack. The killer struck again a number of times.
Zainab's father, Muhammad Amin Ansari, says if the previous attacks had been investigated properly then the person who killed his daughter could have been stopped.
"If, at that time, they had found the killers after what had happened to those girls -- if there had been a proper investigation -- then maybe we wouldn't have to see what's happening right now," he said.
As Zainab's father spoke, her mother, Nusrat Ansari, stared down at the floor, her face wrapped in a thick blue dupatta.
Her daughter was "like an angel," she said, her voice breaking as she described the moment she heard that Zainab's body had been found. "It was as if the floor had fallen from underneath my feet," she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment