Murder of Zainab Ansari
seven year old girl who was abducted, raped and murdered in Kasur, Pakistan
Zainab Amin Ansari (Urdu: زینب امین انصاری; c. 2010 – January 2018) was a seven-year-old Pakistani girl who was abducted in her hometown of Kasur, Punjab while she was on her way to Quran recitation classes on 4 January 2018. Her body was found discarded five days later within a garbage disposal site near the city of Lahore on 9 January 2018; an autopsy report disclosed that she had been extensively raped and tortured before being strangled to death. Her rapist and murderer, 24-year-old Imran Ali, was arrested and identified as a serial killer responsible for at least seven previous rapes and murders of prepubescent girls in the region. Her case was taken by one of the renowned lawyer of Pakistan Mr Aftab Ahmed Bajwa, Advocate Supreme Court of Pakistan and assisted by Mr Hamza Khalid Farani, Advocate.
Ansari's murder incited widespread protests and outrage throughout Pakistan, and ultimately led to the passage of Pakistan's first national child safety law, known as the Zainab Alert Bill (similar to the AMBER Alert system in the United States). The bill directs that any individual found guilty of child abuse faces a minimum mandatory sentence of life imprisonment and also stipulates instigating legal action against any law enforcement officials who cause any unnecessary delay in investigating such cases within two hours of a child being reported as missing.
Event
The incident occurred when Ansari's parents were in Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah, while she was temporarily living with her uncle. On 4 January 2018, she went missing while on her way to a Quran tuition class near her home. Her uncle, Muhammad Adnan, lodged a complaint with the Kasur District police office. CCTV video footage discovered by Ansari's family without any aid from local authorities showed her accompanied by an unknown bearded man in white clothes and a jacket, holding her hand and walking on Peerowala Road in Kasur.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murder of Zainab Ansari” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.