‘Are you here to bring my daughter back?’

The body of a teenaged schoolgirl was found on Karachi’s Seaview beach on September 26. The autopsy report of the girl confirmed that she was “sodomised”.

KARACHI: “Who would do this to me? I am just a poor kulfi seller, I don’t have enemies,” said the father of the 13-year-old schoolgirl found sexually abused and killed on Thursday morning. “I only had one child, this daughter,” he added, held his head in his hands and broke down while sitting in the front seat of the ambulance, which had his daughter’s remains, outside the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre mortuary.

The body in a school uniform was in bad condition when it had washed ashore on Seaview beach. “It was so bad that we couldn’t even wait till Asr when we had planned the burial for,” the child’s maternal aunt told Dawn soon after the funeral at their home in Azizabad.

Next to her on the sofa lay the victim’s deathly pale mother, sometimes making sense sometimes not. “Why are you all here? Are you here to bring my daughter back?” the mother asked the women sitting on the floor around her.

“Please excuse her. She has been quite unwell, recently. She only had surgery to remove a tumour nine days ago,” her sister and the victim’s aunt explained.

“In fact, that is how my niece was kidnapped,” the aunt said. “She was in school on Sept 24 when they had a burqa-clad visitor with a veil over the face at around 11am after recess. The woman said she had been sent over to take the child home as her mother had taken a turn for the worse. So we are told that they let the woman take her away from school,” she said.

The aunt said that her niece was a class-four student. “She had initially been admitted to an Urdu-medium school but then after seeing her cousins attending an English-medium private school, her parents, too, decided to send her to a private English-medium school. That’s why she had gotten a little behind others her age. Still we were confident that she would catch up, she was brilliant in studies after all. She always got full marks in mathematics,” the aunt said.

“I chose the best school I could afford for my daughter. She was my only child. I had her after 12 years of marriage, after many prayers and mannat. People say we should educate our daughters. This is what I got for sending my daughter to a good school,” the mother added while sobbing. “Please tell me, can you bring her back?” she asked the same question again.

“We were all worried when my niece didn’t return from school day before yesterday. On inquiring from the school, we were told that they had already sent her home with some woman. I mean, how irresponsible can a school be?” the aunt said.

She continued: “My brother-in-law is a very simple man but my husband has connections. That’s when he went to the police. But you know how the police are. At first they thought that she would return home herself eventually but later they did lodge an FIR after we received three phone calls between 2.30pm and 3pm from the mobile phone number 0331-7029932.

“The caller was male and it seemed that he had a camera fixed somewhere inside our home because he kept demanding to put the girl’s father on the line. He knew that the man he was speaking to was not the father. He also mentioned that he knew that her mother was near the phone but he wanted to speak only to her father. My brother-in-law was at the police station then. It is also strange that the caller had his mobile number.

“My husband used his connections to get data about those phone calls. The number is switched off now but we found out that the SIM is from Multan.”