A two-year-old girl’s body was found after she was sexually assaulted and tortured in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan on October 7. Social media users shared the hashtag #AnotherZainab to shed light on the cases of violence against women and girls in the country.
Residents and police said the minor girl, Zainab, had gone missing in the evening of October 6 in the Sheikh Kallay Qilla area of her hometown, Charsadda, while playing with a group of children outside her house.
On Wednesday, the police got information about the body of the girl lying in Peshawar’s Jabba Korona area. Cops recovered the body and shifted it to the Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar for a post-mortem, according to local media reports.
District Police Officer (DPO) in the Charsadda locality, Mohammad Shoaib Khan, said that police had initially registered a First Information Report (FIR), against unknown kidnappers on the complaint of the girl's father. According to local media reports, eight suspects have been arrested so far in the case.
Khan said that initial investigation "suggests that the minor was assaulted before her murder", adding that there were torture marks on the girl's body. Police are waiting for a medical report to confirm more details.
According to a news report, Zainab's father demanded that the government catches the culprits as soon as possible and provides justice to the family.
"Today it is my Zainab, tomorrow another Zainab could suffer this," he was quoted as saying.
Netizens demand #JusticeforZainab
Social media users shared the hashtags #JusticeforZainab and #AnotherZainab as they expressed outrage over the incident.
Twitter user @S_H_Gillani wrote: “Another Day. Another Tragedy. Another incident. Another Rape! But the question here is till when? How to stop this? Where is the state? How many more Zainabs have to face the brutal rapists? #JusticeForZainab”
Tweep @Yeh_tu_hoga wrote about a recent rape case that happened in Lahore, which caused outrage across the country: “Motorway case remains unsolved while more and more horrifying cases of sexual assault are being reported. But yeah ban games and [television series] first because that's how judiciary system of Pakistan works. I am not even surprised honestly, disgusted to the core. #JusticeForZainab”
Photos of the two-year-old's body circulated on social media with many users comparing the incident to the 2018 rape and murder of eight-year-old Zainab Amin in Kasur city.
Zainab Amin had gone missing on Jan 4, 2018 and five days later, a police constable deputed to trace the girl recovered her body from a heap of trash. Police said the girl seemed to have been killed four or five days earlier.
