Heinous crime: ‘I have never seen such a mother in my whole life’

Teenager was set alight on Wednesday

LAHORE: Two young girls stand inches away from charred bricks and ash, staring at the detritus of a “kind and gentle” teenager who taught them the Holy Quran but was savagely burned by her mother for marrying the man of her choice.

Maham and Muskan were pictured on Wednesday with their eyes riveted to the spot where, just hours before, 16-year-old Zeenat Bibi was doused in kerosene and set alight. That night, Maham’s mother had to reassure her tearful and confused daughter that she loved her.

“She cried a lot and wept a lot, she did not eat anything,” Rani Bibi, who shares the last name with Zeenat’s family, said on Thursday.

“She slept with me. Before sleeping she asked many questions: Why was my teacher killed? Why did her mum kill her?” I said, “don’t worry. You are my beloved daughter.”

Maham, pictured in pink and black and frowning as she looked at the burn marks, said she had seen her teacher’s feet beneath the shroud covering her body. “When I saw that I started weeping because my teacher was dead,” the 10-year-old said.

Muskan, also 10, had been taught the Quran by her too, the child’s grandmother Nasreen Bibi said.

“Her face was very pale when she returned from the house,” she said of her granddaughter. “She was looking very afraid.” Zeenat, both the women added, was “so kind and gentle”.

Police have said the teenager was killed on Wednesday by her mother after marrying Hasan Khan, her long-term boyfriend. Burns covered 90 percent of her body. A post-mortem to determine whether she was still alive when she was set on fire was being conducted. None of her relatives sought to claim her body, police said on Thursday, leaving new husband’s family to bury her charred remains before dawn in a graveyard near the city. The vicious murder has sparked fresh calls for action against so-called “honour killings” in Pakistan. Hundreds of women are killed each year by their relatives after allegedly bringing shame on their families in Pakistan.

“I have never seen such a mother in my whole life,” Zeenat’s mother-in-law Shahida Bibi said. “Zeenat was so cute, so simple, so innocent and so kind... I loved her very much,” she said. Her own child has been left shaken, Bibi said. “Our boy has gone mad,” she said.

Fear and depression have taken over the neighbourhood a day after the murder, residents said.

“Parents should protect their children,” said Muhammad Asghar, a neighbour who has two daughters and one son.

His daughters, Amina and Fatima, were also students of Zeenat, he said. They were visiting their grandparents when the teenager was killed, and learned of her death on television. “They phoned me... they were weeping, wanting to come home,” Asghar said. It is the first time such an attack has taken place in the neighbourhood, he said, but it has frightened him so much that he is now considering moving. “We will start preaching to parents to take care of their kids,” said another neighbour, 60-year-old Firdaus Bibi. The message will fall into a void at Zeenat’s home, where the doors remained locked on Thursday.

“They have left,” Ashgar said.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2016.