The butcher of Peshawar

Our system needs to reform itself from the core and we need to talk to killers and rapists to study their triggers

Yes, I know a lot is happening on the political and economic front in the country for all of us to worry about. But all that is not what I find worth commenting upon. There’s something else which is way more important.

Sohail, the accused, was a craftsman at a local embroidery shop in Peshawar. After work, he would change his get-up, lure young girls and then kill them after sexually assaulting them. He did so with three little girls out of which he killed two whereas the third one thankfully survived. Sohail’s age has been told to be between 20 and 25 years. His case will now be proceeded before the relevant Court to adjudicate upon whether he lives or dies.

Prima facie, the matter seems to be that of just another sick minded, twisted individual fulfilling his fantasies at the expense of innocent lives. But the problem lies deeper.

Soon, Sohail will rightly face his sentence and will either be incarcerated for the rest of his life or executed. Or he might just die while on death row. In either case, the victim’s families will breathe a sigh of relief and get on with their lives. But we’ll never ever know what was going on in the mind of Sohail that forced him to carry out such inhumane and atrocious acts.

In order to figure out and analyse why he did, what he did, we need to talk to him and people like him in order to learn more. In my previous articles titled ‘Wisdom of a psychopath’ and ‘Fear of the dark’, I went on and on about how we need to interview Zahir Jaffer in order to ascertain deeper into his criminal mind.

The thing about humans is that we are creatures of emotion and we let emotions dictate our thoughts rather than rationale. I sympathise with the victims’ families and they do deserve to see the killer of their daughters to be behind bars, maybe even dead. But killing Sohail, just like killing Zahir Jaffer, will not prevent crimes likes these from happening in the future. We’re only treating the symptoms and not the disease.

Our system needs to reform itself from the core and we desperately need to talk to killers and rapists to study their triggers, their traumas and their childhoods. It is not surprising to know that many criminals carry with them excessive childhood trauma. Similarly, it is also not surprising to know that many criminals come from broken families.

Sohail’s case is quite interesting. His crimes have a clear pattern. His victims are young girls, his method of killing is strangulation and his crime is inter alia sexual assault. A bare perusal of his killing pattern reveals one obvious thing. He sexually assaults his victim before killing them. Is this a man who in his adolescence either witnessed or suffered extreme domestic violence and/or child abuse? Maybe Sohail is now avenging his childhood abuse by projecting it upon innocent girls. But why girls? Why not boys? Is this someone who was brought in an extremely patriarchal household where abuse and bias against women was rampant?

All these questions demand answering and demand answering by those who commit such heinous and inhumane crimes. Merely incarcerating these people will not cut it. You kill one Sohail today; you will be bringing up another one tomorrow. You kill one Zahir Jaffer today; you will probably see another tomorrow.

Mass incarcerations will only cause more taxpayer money to be spent on prison facilities. What Pakistan needs immediately is a robust criminology and forensics department setup which actively interviews criminals, profiles them and has an effective child support system to prevent children from abuse and neglect. The problem lies at the root.

One abused or neglected child just might be the next Javed Iqbal, the next Zahir Jaffer or the next Sohail.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd, 2022.

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