Zainab Ansari was six years old, and in early January 2018 her parents were away in Saudi Arabia on the Umrah pilgrimage. She was staying with her maternal aunt in the Road Kot area of Kasur, a city in Pakistan's Punjab province about 50 kilometers from Lahore. On January 4 she set out for her Quran lessons, a short walk away. She did not arrive. Five days later her body was found on a rubbish heap in the city.
Her mother, Nusrat Bibi, had taught her what to do if a stranger tried to lead her away. "The girl was very wise and obedient," she told Agence France-Presse afterward. "They were unable to find my daughter for five days."
Zainab's death was not the first of its kind in Kasur. According to police documents and officials quoted by the BBC, Dawn and AFP, she was about the twelfth young child found raped and killed in the city in two years. What made her case different was what happened next: riots in which police shot two protesters dead, a national campaign under the hashtag #JusticeForZainab, the involvement of the chief justice and the army chief, and an arrest, a trial and an execution carried out at a speed rarely seen in Pakistan. The man hanged for her death, Imran Ali, lived a few streets away.
Kasur had been in the news over child abuse before. In 2015 a gang in the village of Hussain Khanwala, about 10 kilometers south of the city, was found to have sexually abused more than 200 children on camera and used the footage to blackmail their families, according to a fact-finding report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan cited by Al Jazeera. AFP put the number of children at 280 at least. Police acted only after clashes between families and the authorities brought the case to national attention. Pakistan made child sexual abuse a criminal offence for the first time in 2016, after that case.
In 2017 a different pattern began. On July 23, 2017, Dawn's Kasur correspondent, Afzal Ansari, reported that ten children aged five to ten, seven girls and three boys, had been raped and killed in Kasur since the start of the year, their bodies found in unfinished houses within about 10 kilometers of one another. Police had solved none of the cases. The newspaper reported that about 150 people, among them a prayer leader, had been rounded up in twelve days after the latest killing, and that some said they had been beaten to make them confess and that their families had paid officials to get them released. Residents blocked roads in protest after each death. One father told the paper he had stopped sending his daughters to their tuition classes, and compared the fear in the city to the fear of terrorism.
Not all of those children were later linked to one man, and this bio does not treat them as his victims. What investigators eventually found was a single DNA profile on a group of girls who lived within about three kilometers of one another. All of them went missing close to home, and none of them was buried. The BBC, which saw a police document in January 2018, counted ten similar cases in the city since January 2017 and the same DNA traces on six of the victims, including Zainab.
The first girl in the series was Ayesha Asif, whom the BBC called Ayesha Bibi. She was five. She disappeared from outside her home on January 7, 2017, almost exactly a year before Zainab, and her body was found the same day, according to the record read out in court. It was her father's birthday. Asif Baba, a vegetable seller, kept the white teddy bear she had given him that day, along with her school uniforms and her dolls. "This is not a house, it's a graveyard," he told the BBC in January 2018. After Ayesha's death, he said, his other daughter did not speak for four months and was afraid to go to a family wedding in case she was taken too.
The next month, Iman Fatima, about five years old, was playing in the street with her five-year-old cousin, Adeel, when a man took her away. Her body was found on February 24, 2017, on a plot near her school. Her mother, Tahira Tawzeen, told Vice that Iman liked helping her cook. "I am so angry with the police," she said. "Why didn't they do more for my Iman?"
Noor Fatima's body was found on April 11, 2017. Laiba Saleem's was found on July 8, 2017. Dawn's July 2017 report describes an eight-year-old girl found that day in Shah Inayat Colony, who had gone missing on her way to a tuition class in her street. Little else about Noor and Laiba as people appears in the sources consulted for this page.
In November 2017 a six-year-old girl named Qainat went to buy yogurt from a shop down the road from her house. She was found in a nearby graveyard, alive. Her uncle, Irfan Ali, told the BBC in January 2018 that she had spent two months in hospital, paralyzed and unable to speak or, it seemed, to recognize her family. She was the only girl, he said, to have survived. Police later linked her attack to the same DNA. "Zainab's family are rich and have political connections. All of the rest of us are poor," he told the BBC. "No politician came to see us. No one cares."
Iman Fatima's case had been declared solved within hours. Her cousin Adeel identified a house and then a man: Mudasir (also spelled Mudassir and Mudassar), a 21-year-old factory worker whose family had moved to Kasur about two years earlier. Police shot him dead in February 2017. One police account said he was killed resisting arrest. Another senior officer told the BBC he confessed in custody and was then shot "trying to escape." A relative of Iman's told the BBC police had called him to the station to hear Mudasir confess.
His family said police killed him knowing he was not the killer because they could not find the real one, and that no DNA test was done before his death. Dawn later reported that his DNA did not match any of the 171 samples collected in Iman's case. When the DNA from the Zainab investigation pointed to Imran Ali instead, Iman's father told the BBC: "I'm so worried. The real killer is still roaming free, and an innocent man has been killed." Mudasir's mother, Jamila Bibi, said, "I feel as if I have lost everything. They killed my son." The family left Kasur days after his death because no one in the neighborhood would speak to them.
Mudasir was not the only one. Dunya News reported that Kasur police had killed another suspect, Amanat, in a similar "encounter," and an uncle of one of the girls told AFP that police had already killed three people wrongly in such cases. Asif Baba said police twice or three times brought men before him and told him they were the killers, and that the men said so themselves. He refused to believe it without a DNA match, and when the DNA reports came, he said, they cleared the men.
Zainab went missing on January 4, 2018. Her family said the police did little. "My relatives and neighbours told me that the police used to come, have food and leave," her father, Muhammad Amin Ansari, said when he landed at Islamabad airport on January 10. It was relatives, not police, who found the security camera footage of her last movements: a small girl walking hand in hand with a man down a narrow lane. The footage was broadcast again and again and spread across social media. "If the police would have acted immediately, the culprit would have been caught," Ansari told Geo TV.
Her body was found on January 9, about two kilometers from her home. The district police chief, Zulfiqar Hameed, said the autopsy suggested she had been raped and strangled several days earlier.
On January 10, hours before Zainab's funeral, crowds in Kasur attacked a police station and a nearby government building. Local television showed police firing toward stone-throwing protesters; in one clip an officer tells another to hold his fire, and the second officer keeps shooting. Two people were killed. Thousands of people surrounded police stations, and the homes of ruling-party politicians were set on fire. The district police officer was removed pending an inquiry into the shooting. Zainab's father said the family would not bury her until her killer was arrested.
Across the country there were candlelight vigils, and #JusticeForZainab became one of the top trending topics on social media worldwide. Film stars and cricketers demanded an arrest. The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Mian Saqib Nisar, took suo motu notice of the case and demanded a report from the Punjab police chief within 24 hours; the army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, offered the military's help; the chief justice of the Lahore High Court ordered an inquiry; and the Punjab chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, visited the family. The provincial government set up a joint investigation team. The BBC noted that opposition politicians were also using the case against the ruling PML-N, whose base was in Punjab.
The outrage reached parents whose children had died months earlier without such attention. "The district police chief told us if they can't arrest the culprit then what can they do," Muhammad Ayub, whose eight-year-old niece had been killed in July 2017, told AFP. "We have been forced to lock our kids inside our homes," said another resident, Ghulam Fareed. The district police chief, Zahid Nawaz Marwat, said he was confident the main suspect would be presented within days.
Within days investigators had confirmed what families had suspected. "The perpetrator involved in the murder is a serial killer," the Punjab government spokesman, Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan, told AFP. In six of the cases, the head of the Kasur district hospital told AFP, investigators had found the same DNA.
The inquiry that came next, which Gulf News later called unprecedented, drew in almost every law enforcement and intelligence agency and rested on mass DNA screening. Police went door to door through the neighborhood, took samples from hundreds of men and sent them to the Punjab Forensic Science Agency in Lahore, which a senior official, Rana Muhammad Shafique, described as the country's only forensic laboratory of its kind. "Our 50-member team of DNA scientists conducted tests on 60 to 70 people every day until they traced the culprit," he told AFP. The final count was given as 1,150 by the chief minister and as 1,187 by a judge of the Lahore High Court. Police told Vice they put 300 plainclothes officers on the streets of Kasur from January 13 to 15. On Sunday, January 21, the Supreme Court gave the Punjab police chief 72 hours to make an arrest.
Late on January 23, 2018, Shahbaz Sharif told a press conference in Lahore that Zainab's killer had been arrested. "His name is Imran, he is 24 years old and a resident of Kasur, he is a serial killer," he said. His DNA, Sharif said, matched the evidence from the crime scene "100 percent," and in a polygraph test "the culprit confessed all of his wrong doings, we have the video recording."
Imran Ali's own life is barely documented in the sources consulted. Reports gave his age as 23 or 24. He lived on Kot Road, on a street next to Zainab's and very close to her aunt's house. Daily Pakistan, citing the president of the Kasur Press Club, described him as a laborer and a local reciter of devotional poetry. Police sources told the Press Trust of India that he knew Zainab's family and visited their home.
He had already been in police hands. Police sources said he was picked up in the door-to-door sweeps early in the investigation and released, and accounts differ on why: one senior officer told AFP he was let go after he denied involvement, while sources quoted by the Press Trust of India said he was freed after Zainab's family told police he could not be the culprit. He then left Kasur and moved between Phoolnagar, Pakpattan and other towns, apparently unaware that he was being watched, and was arrested in Pakpattan district.
Zainab's father said Imran had joined the protests over her death. "He was the person who insisted upon continuing the protests and keeping the body of Zainab on road when we had negotiations with the police chief and agreed to bury Zainab's body," Ansari told AFP.
On January 24 an anti-terrorism court in Lahore remanded Imran in custody for fourteen days. A Kasur police spokesman, Muhammad Sajid, told AFP that his DNA had matched all eight cases and that he had confessed.
Imran Ali was tried by Anti-Terrorism Court No. 1 in Lahore under Pakistan's Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows crimes considered to have spread terror in society to be charged as terrorism. The judge was Sajjad Ahmad (also reported as Sheikh Sajjad Ahmed). The hearings were held inside Kot Lakhpat Central Jail in Lahore, which the Punjab prosecutor general said was for the defendant's own protection. Journalists were stopped 500 meters from the prison, and only the victim's relatives were allowed into court. The Lahore High Court ordered the trial court to reach a verdict within seven days of indictment, and on February 10 the chief justice closed his suo motu case with the same instruction.
The court indicted Imran on Monday, February 12, 2018. Geo News reported that he confessed in court that day. The prosecutor, Abdul Rauf Wattoo, had listed 55 witnesses and evidence that included the CCTV footage, DNA and polygraph tests, Imran's clothes and the medical reports; Daily Pakistan reported that a jacket like the one seen in the footage had been recovered from him. Witnesses included Zainab's paternal uncle and her five-year-old brother.
On Wednesday, February 14, Imran confessed in court to the rape and murder of other girls in Kasur. Daily Pakistan and Gulf News named four of them: Ayesha Asif, Iman Fatima, Noor Fatima and Laiba Saleem. He also described how he had lured the girls and where he had taken them. His private lawyer, Mehr Shakeel Multani, then withdrew, telling the judge that his conscience would not let him defend the accused after the confession. The prosecutor general assigned a state lawyer, Mian Sultan Masood, who completed the cross-examination. The judge reserved his verdict on Thursday, February 15, after 56 prosecution witnesses had testified. The trial had taken four days.
On Saturday, February 17, 2018, the judge announced the verdict at Kot Lakhpat with Zainab's father present. Imran Ali was sentenced to death on four counts: kidnapping a child under fourteen (Section 364-A of the Pakistan Penal Code), rape (Section 376), murder (Section 302-B) and an act of terrorism under Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for an unnatural offence (Section 377) and to seven years for disposing of the body (Section 201). One million rupees was ordered paid to Zainab's family. Reports put the total fines at 3.2 million rupees; Dawn later corrected its own figure to 4.1 million.
"It was a fair trial," said Mian Sultan Masood. "The accused had confessed his crime. In this context he was correctly sentenced to death." The prosecutor general, Ihtesham Qadir, said the evidence was "irrefutable." A senior lawyer, Azam Nazir Tarar, told Dawn he had reservations about a trial held in a jail and in closed court, though he said any shortcomings could be put right on appeal.
Zainab's mother wanted more. "I want him hanged where he threw Zainab's body," Nusrat Bibi told Al Jazeera. "Hanging him is just ordinary for him." To other reporters she said: "He has not murdered just one young girl. He has killed many more and his public execution will deter others from committing such acts." Her husband thanked the chief justice, who he said had treated Zainab "like his own daughter," and added: "Generations to come need to be safeguarded and children everywhere need to be protected."
Imran appealed through the jail administration, claiming innocence and arguing that the court had rushed the trial and ignored legal formalities. On Tuesday, March 20, 2018, the Lahore High Court dismissed the appeal. Gulf News and Geo News name the bench as Justice Sadaqat Ali Khan and Justice Shahram Sarwar Chaudhry. His lawyer, Asad Jamal, questioned whether the DNA findings should have been admitted and argued that DNA was not foolproof. Imran himself asked for leniency on the ground that by confessing he had saved the court's time. "No one should raise objections when court gives justice on time," Justice Sadaqat Ali Khan remarked, according to Dunya News, and Justice Shahram Sarwar noted that only Imran's DNA, out of 1,187 people tested, had matched.
On June 12, 2018, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court sitting at its Lahore registry, Justices Asif Saeed Khosa, Manzoor Ahmed Malik and Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, rejected his appeal. The court noted that he had pleaded guilty at trial and given a detailed confession supported by CCTV footage, photographs, DNA tests and medical evidence. It called the crimes "absolutely horrendous and barbaric," noted that he had admitted similar offences against eight other minor victims, and said he deserved no sympathy in sentencing.
His last avenue was a plea for clemency to the president. President Arif Alvi rejected it on October 10, 2018.
The cases over the other children were tried separately in the same court. On August 6, 2018, Dawn reported that the anti-terrorism court, sitting in the prison, had sentenced Imran Ali, by then 24, to death on twelve more counts, four in each of three cases. The victims were Ayesha, Laiba and Noor Fatima, whom the paper described as aged five, seven and eight. He was fined ten million rupees in all, half of it as compensation to the families.
By October 12, 2018, according to Dawn, seven rape and murder cases had been brought against him besides Zainab's, and the court had ruled in five, handing down 21 death sentences, three life terms and a cumulative 23 years in prison. Two cases were still pending. The sources consulted for this page do not say which girls the remaining decided case or the two pending cases concerned. The BBC wrote at the time of the execution that he had been convicted of similar crimes against six more girls; Al Jazeera said four. The figures cannot be fully reconciled from the published reports.
On Friday, October 12, 2018, the anti-terrorism court issued death warrants for October 17 at Kot Lakhpat Central Jail. Zainab's father went to the Lahore High Court one more time. Citing Section 22 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, which his lawyer said allowed the government to hang a convict in public, he asked that Imran Ali be executed publicly as a deterrent, and that if not, the hanging be televised. The provincial government had already turned down a similar request as contrary to Pakistani law. On October 16 a two-judge bench, Justices Sardar Shamim Ahmed and Shehbaz Rizvi, dismissed the petition, saying it was not for the court to decide.
Imran Ali was hanged early on Wednesday, October 17, 2018, at Kot Lakhpat jail, in the presence of a magistrate, Adil Sarwar, and of Zainab's father and uncle. Police and riot units surrounded the prison. "He walked by himself to the gallows," Zainab's cousin, Muzammil Ansari, told Al Jazeera. "He did not ask for any forgiveness from us." A brother of Imran's and two friends had come with an ambulance, and his family, escorted by police, took his body back to Kasur.
Outside the jail Amin Ansari told reporters he was satisfied, and regretted only that the hanging had not been shown on television. "Zainab would have been seven years, two months old today," he said. "Her mother is devastated from grief." The purpose of asking for a public hanging, he said, had been to deter others, but he believed the coverage of the case had already made families more careful about how their children got to school and back. "Our daughter's gone, she will never come back," Muzammil Ansari said. "But we wanted to save the other daughters of the nation."
Pakistan had lifted its moratorium on executions in late 2014, after the attack on a school in Peshawar. Al Jazeera counted at least 497 executions between then and Imran Ali's, and noted rights groups' concerns about fair trials in an overloaded criminal justice system.
The DNA results also reopened the earlier cases. Dunya News reported that a joint investigation team was set up to examine Mudasir's killing, and that six police officials were taken into custody. On February 6, 2018, a Lahore magistrate remanded two former station house officers, Riaz Abbas and Younas Dogar, for four days in what Pakistan Today called the "fake encounter case." A writ petition named the former district police officer, Ali Nasir Rizvi, and a deputy superintendent, Mirza Arif Rasheed. Mudasir's mother and lawyer said the police were pressuring them to drop the names of senior officers and offering them money to withdraw the case. The outcome of that case could not be confirmed from the sources consulted.
In the weeks after the arrest, the case drew claims that went well beyond the evidence. The most prominent came from a television anchor, Dr. Shahid Masood of News One, who said on air that Imran Ali was part of an international child pornography ring protected by powerful people, that he held more than 37 bank accounts, most of them in foreign currency, that a sitting federal minister was involved, and that there was a plan to kill him in a police encounter. On January 29, 2018, the Supreme Court set up a three-member team, led by the director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, Bashir Memon, to examine the claims. Its report, filed on March 1, found all eighteen of them false and without evidence. It described Imran as a poor man. The State Bank of Pakistan had separately rejected the bank account claims. On March 20, 2018, the Supreme Court barred Masood from hosting current affairs programs for three months after he apologized.
Other early reports also went unconfirmed. On the day of the arrest Daily Pakistan reported that Imran had said a demon made him attack girls, and police sources quoted in Gulf News described him as a relative of Zainab's. Neither claim came from a court record. AFP reported that Imran had confessed to eight attacks but that it was not clear whether the other four of the twelve recorded Kasur cases were linked to him. The prosecutor general spoke of nine girls, two of them alive; a police spokesman told AFP that three girls had survived. This page counts as his victims only those named in court reports or linked to him by DNA in published official statements.
The promises made in January 2018 were slow to turn into law. When Imran Ali was hanged, the BBC's M. Ilyas Khan wrote that the government of the time had promised tough action on police training and legislation, but that "not much was ever done after those initial statements of intent." The child rights group Sahil recorded about 2,300 crimes against children in Pakistan in the first six months of 2018, 57 of them children killed after being raped.
In 2020 Parliament passed a law in Zainab's name. The Senate approved the Zainab Alert, Recovery and Response Bill on March 4, 2020, and the National Assembly passed it with the Senate's amendments on March 11, on a motion moved by the human rights minister, Shireen Mazari, who said it would go to President Alvi for signature. The bill set up a Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Agency (ZARRA), headed by a director general appointed by the prime minister, to work with the 1099 helpline and the National Commission on the Rights of the Child. It required police to register a report as soon as a child was reported missing, to begin searching at once and to finish investigations into the kidnapping, rape and murder of children within three months. Officers who caused unnecessary delay, or failed to respond to an alert within two hours, could face action. It set a minimum sentence of ten years and a maximum of life imprisonment, with a fine of one million rupees, for sexual abuse of children. Arab News described the bill as covering the Islamabad Capital Territory; the state news agency APP said it would apply across the country.
The killings in Kasur did not stop with Imran Ali. In September 2019 the bodies of three boys were found in the Chunian area of Kasur district, and crowds again blocked roads and surrounded a police station. "Sadly, the police did not co-operate with us in the search for the children," the uncle of one of the missing boys told the BBC.
Imran Ali was executed on October 17, 2018, and the case against him in Zainab's death is closed. As of the latest source consulted on the remaining cases, Dawn's report of October 12, 2018, two of the cases over other girls had not been decided when he was hanged; no later report on them was found. The outcome of the case against the police officers over Mudasir's killing, and the current working of the Zainab Alert law, were not checked beyond reports from February 2018 and March 2020.
2015: Child abuse ring exposed in Hussain Khanwala, Kasur district.
January 7, 2017: Ayesha Asif, 5, disappears from outside her home and is found dead.
February 2017: Iman Fatima, about 5, is taken from the street; found February 24. Police shoot Mudasir, 21, as her killer.
April 11, 2017: Noor Fatima found dead.
July 8, 2017: Laiba Saleem found dead.
July 23, 2017: Dawn reports ten children raped and killed in Kasur in six months, none solved.
November 2017: Qainat, 6, is attacked and survives with severe injuries.
January 4, 2018: Zainab Ansari goes missing on her way to Quran lessons.
January 9, 2018: Her body is found.
January 10, 2018: Riots in Kasur; police fire kills two protesters. Chief justice takes suo motu notice.
January 19, 2018: BBC Newsnight reports DNA suggests Mudasir was innocent.
January 21, 2018: Supreme Court gives police 72 hours to make an arrest.
January 23, 2018: Arrest of Imran Ali announced after DNA screening of more than 1,100 men.
January 29, 2018: Supreme Court forms a team to examine Shahid Masood's claims.
February 12, 2018: Imran Ali indicted inside Kot Lakhpat jail.
February 14, 2018: He confesses in court to the killings of other girls; his lawyer withdraws.
February 17, 2018: Sentenced to death on four counts.
March 1, 2018: Supreme Court team finds Masood's 18 claims false.
March 20, 2018: Lahore High Court dismisses his appeal; Masood is barred from air for three months.
June 12, 2018: Supreme Court rejects his appeal.
August 6, 2018: Sentenced to death in the cases of Ayesha, Laiba and Noor Fatima.
October 10, 2018: President Arif Alvi rejects his clemency plea.
October 12, 2018: Death warrants issued; Dawn reports five of seven further cases decided.
October 16, 2018: Lahore High Court dismisses the family's plea for a public hanging.
October 17, 2018: Imran Ali hanged at Kot Lakhpat Central Jail, Lahore.
March 4 and 11, 2020: Senate and National Assembly pass the Zainab Alert, Recovery and Response Bill.