Muslim custom decrees that the dead must be buried almost immediately. But the father of 7-year-old Zainab, who was raped and strangled last week, says he won't bury her until her killer is found and punished.
“We will not bury her until we get justice,” he told reporters. “We are now afraid of letting our children leave the home. How was our child kidnapped from a busy market?”
As her relatives tell it, Zainab's horrifying last few hours unfolded like this: The child had been staying with her aunt while her parents traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the umrah pilgrimage. On Thursday, relatives say, she left home for a nearby Koran recital. She never returned.
On Tuesday, police found her body in a dumpster about a mile from her home in Kasur, a city in Punjab province. According to early autopsy reports, Zainab had been raped multiple times and strangled four or five days earlier.
Police say that they are investigating the death and that charges should follow soon. Officials say that DNA was recovered from Zainab's body and that early evidence suggests the perpetrator was a family acquaintance. But lawmakers also seemed to suggest that Zainab's family deserved some blame for what happened to her.
“A child's safety is its parents' responsibility,” Rana Sanaullah, the law minister of Punjab, told the newspaper Dawn. Zainab's father, however, has pointed the finger at police. “If the police had acted immediately, the culprit would have been caught,” he told reporters.
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