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The funeral of the eight-year-old girl who was raped and killed Qazi Mehmood/AP/Press Association Images
Pakistan
Two people killed in protest against rape and murder of eight-year-old girl
Hundreds of people attended the protest in Kasur, which turned violent.
AT LEAST TWO people were killed when a protest against the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl turned violent in Pakistan today, police have said.
Paramilitary forces were called to the city of Kasur near the Indian border, Punjab provincial police said. A senior police official told AFP hundreds of people were protesting the killing, which also prompted a deluge of outrage on social media.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the child named Zainab was kidnapped on 4 January. Her dead body was found in rubbish yesterday.
Zainab is the eighth minor to have been raped and murdered in Kasur in the past year, the police official said, adding that investigators could not confirm if they had a serial killer on their hands.
Her murder ignited fury in Kasur, which made global headlines in August 2015 for a massive child abuse and extortion scandal.
Violence broke today when demonstrators tried to storm the police station, the police official said.
“Two protesters have been killed and three others injured, the situation is still tense,” he said. It was not clear how the two protesters were killed.
Growing outrage
A spokesman for the Punjab provincial police said paramilitary troops had been called in to restore order.
#JusticeForZainab became a top Twitter hashtag in the country as outrage grew and politicians called for action.
“The beasts who have disrespected our daughters should be punished immediately,” former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said.
Cricketer-turned-opposition leader Imran Khan urged authorities to act swiftly.
“The condemnable & horrific rape & murder of little Zainab exposes once again how vulnerable our children are in our society,” he tweeted.
The girl’s parents, who had been in Saudi Arabia, flew back to Pakistan today.
“For the last two years, we are living in fear, parents are scared to send their kids outside,” her father Amin Ansari said in televised comments.
Pakistan’s chief justice called for a police report within 24 hours, a Supreme Court statement said, while a spokesman for the military tweeted that the army chief had directed “all out support to civil administration to arrest the criminals and bring them to exemplary justice”.
The 2015 scandal saw allegations that at least 280 children were filmed being sexually abused by a gang of 25 men who blackmailed their parents by threatening to leak the videos.
Dubbed the largest child abuse scandal in Pakistan’s history, it came to light after parents of the victims clashed with police in Kasur during a protest blasting authorities for failing to prosecute the case.
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