The 2 year old, identified as Zainab, was found raped and murdered a day after she was kidnapped from her home town of Charsadda on the 6th of October in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Her body was found severely mutilated. Photos of the two-year-old’s body were circulated on social media with many users comparing the incident to the 2018 rape and murder of 8-year-old Zainab Amin in Kasur.
According to police officials, the victim was abducted in Charsadda and the body was recovered in the Daudzai area of Peshawar. Her clothes were recovered from the same spot. A special police team has already been formed to arrest the perpetrator.
Zainab had gone missing on Tuesday evening in Sheikh Kallay Qilla area while playing with other children outside her house.
District Police Officer (DPO) Charsadda Mohammad Shoaib Khan said that police had initially registered a first information report (FIR) in the Prang police station, Charsadda, against unknown kidnappers on the complaint of the girl’s father.
The initial investigation “suggests that the minor was assaulted before her murder”. There were also torture marks on the girl’s body. Police were waiting for the medical report, after which they would add other sections of the PPC, Khan said.
Zainab’s father informed the police that the family did not have enmity with anyone. He demanded that the government catch the culprit so he could ask him what his daughter had done to him that he committed such a crime.
“Today it is my Zainab, tomorrow another Zainab could suffer this,” he lamented.
According to Sahil, an organisation working for child protection, the major categories in the cases included abduction (331), rape (160), sodomy (233), gang-rape (69) and gang-sodomy (104). Thirteen boys and 12 girls were murdered after sexual abuse while four boys and one girl were murdered after gang-rape. In its most recent statement, foraging through 84 newspapers, Sahil noted that a disturbing 2,846 cases were reported across the country in the previous year. In other words, approximately eight children were subjected to abuse each day of 2019, with more than half being girls (54pc). Prior to that, the figure was even higher at a staggering 3,832 in 2018 — the same year the body of young Zainab Ansari was found in a garbage heap in Kasur; she had been brutally raped and murdered by her captor.
In conversation with the media, IGP Abbasi said that the DPO was personally supervising the investigation of the case.
Curently the hashtags #JusticeforZainab and #AnotherZainab are being used on Twitter to express outrage over exceedingly frequent cases in Pakistan regarding child abuse and murder.
