In the first days of January 2018, a girl named Zainab Ansari walked out of her family's home in Kasur, a city in Pakistan's Punjab province close to the Indian border, to go to a Quran lesson at her aunt's house nearby. She did not arrive. Five days later her body was found on a rubbish heap in the city. She was six years old in the reporting of Dawn and Al Jazeera and seven in the reporting of Geo News and the Associated Press.
Her death was not the first of its kind in Kasur. Police told the Supreme Court of Pakistan that it was the eighth similar case of a girl assaulted and killed in the city since 2015, and Dawn counted it as the twelfth such incident within a few kilometers in a single year. The anger that followed brought riots, two deaths when police fired on protesters, a Supreme Court hearing, and a manhunt in which more than a thousand men gave DNA samples. On January 23, 2018, Punjab's chief minister announced that a 24-year-old local man, Imran Ali, had been arrested and that his DNA matched not only Zainab's case but earlier killings of girls in the same neighborhoods.
Ali was tried inside a Lahore prison by an anti-terrorism court, convicted and sentenced to death within a month of his arrest. Later that year the same court convicted him of three more of the Kasur murders. After his appeals failed and the president refused clemency, he was hanged at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore on October 17, 2018. In 2020 Pakistan's parliament passed the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act, a law to speed up the search for missing children, named after her.
Pakistani names do not follow the Western pattern of a fixed family surname, and the reporting on this case varies. The Punjab government's announcement and Associated Press reports called the convicted man Mohammad Imran; Dawn, Al Jazeera, the courts' reported orders and most Pakistani outlets called him Imran Ali, and one Geo News report gave his name as Imran Ali Naqshbandi.
The child at the center of the case is named in the title of the 2020 law and in reporting around the world. Dawn usually called her Zainab Amin, after her father; the Associated Press, Al Jazeera and NPR called her Zainab Ansari; and Voice of America called her Zainab Fatima. Her father is Muhammad Amin Ansari, sometimes reported as Haji Muhammad Amin or Ameen Ansari, and her mother was named as Nusrat Bibi by Dawn and as Nusrat Amin by Al Jazeera.
Very little was published about Imran Ali's life before his arrest. Geo News, AFP and CNN gave his age as 24 in January 2018; Dawn gave it as 23. He lived in Kasur, in the same area as Zainab's family and, Dawn reported, very close to the house of the aunt she was walking to. Police said he knew Zainab's family, though her father denied that they were related. A joint investigation team that examined claims made about him on television later described him as a poor man.
Zainab's father told AFP that Ali had lived nearby and had taken part in the first protests that broke out after her body was found. Her sister told Geo News that Ali had said he was possessed by djinns. No court finding on his mental state was reported, and the joint investigation team found no evidence of any plan to have him declared mentally ill.
Kasur had been in the national news before. In 2015 police arrested a gang in Hussain Khanwala, a village about 10 kilometers from the city, accused of sexually abusing and filming hundreds of children (Al Jazeera gave more than 200 in one report and more than 280 in another; AFP and NPR gave at least 280). That case involved different offenders and has no link to Imran Ali in any source, but it was part of why the killings of girls in the city from 2015 onward drew so much anger.
A pattern had built up across those years. In the police's account to the Supreme Court in January 2018, there had been eight similar cases since 2015, all within the jurisdictions of three police stations, the first two in the area of the Saddar Division police station. Arab News, reporting from Lahore on January 10, 2018, quoted the regional police officer as saying that 12 cases had been reported in 12 months, and that DNA and the method used matched in five child abuse cases, pointing to one offender. Ten of the 12 kidnappings and killings of girls that year had happened in the first half of 2017, the paper reported, and the bodies had been left in buildings under construction near the victims' homes. On January 13, 2018, police said DNA linked one culprit to at least seven similar cases in the district.
The families of the earlier victims later described police who did not collect evidence or follow up. The mother of one girl, Iman Fatima, told VICE that her "world fell apart" the day her daughter went missing, and the family's lawyer said police never gave them a medical report.
Four of the earlier victims were named in Pakistani reporting at the time of Ali's confession and trial. All four were young girls from Kasur, and all four cases were later connected to him.
Ayesha was found on January 7, 2017, according to The Express Tribune and Gulf News. Iman Fatima, whom Dawn described as five years old, was abducted outside her family's home in February 2017 and found two days later near her school; The Express Tribune and Gulf News give the date as February 24, 2017. Noor Fatima was found on April 11, 2017. Laiba was found on July 8, 2017. Dawn gave the ages of Ayesha, Laiba and Noor Fatima as five, seven and eight when the court ruled in their cases; other outlets give slightly different ages. The Express Tribune and Gulf News gave the surnames Asif for Ayesha and Saleem for Laiba.
In November 2017 a six-year-old girl went missing in Kasur and was found alive on a rubbish heap. She was treated for about a month at the Children's Hospital in Lahore, and her parents were among those who appeared before the Supreme Court in January 2018. She is not named here.
The case of Iman Fatima had a second victim. Within hours of her body being found in February 2017, Kasur police arrested a 21-year-old man named Mudassar (also spelled Mudassir), and hours after that he was shot dead in what police called an "encounter," reportedly while trying to escape. A senior officer told the BBC that he had confessed to the girl's murder before he died. Police said Iman's five-year-old cousin had identified him.
His family said no DNA test was done before his death and that police had killed him because they could not find the real culprit. After Ali's arrest, the director general of the Punjab Forensic Science Agency told DawnNews that Ali's DNA matched samples from the scene of Iman Fatima's murder, and that Mudassar's sample, one of 171 collected after her death, had not matched. A BBC Newsnight investigation had raised the same point, and AFP noted at the time of the arrest that the BBC had accused the police of killing a man wrongly accused in an earlier case. Iman's father told Dawn that he now believed Mudassar had been "killed wrongly." Mudassar's mother said the family had left Kasur after neighbors shunned them.
The Punjab government promised an inquiry. A joint investigation team took six police officers into custody, and in February 2018 two former station house officers, Riaz Abbas and Younas Dogar, were sent on four-day physical remand in what Pakistan Today called the "fake encounter case." What became of that prosecution has not been reported.
Zainab's parents were in Saudi Arabia on Umrah, the pilgrimage to Mecca, when she disappeared. She was staying with relatives in the Road Kot area of Kasur. According to the account given to the Supreme Court, she left home at about 7 p.m. on January 4 to go to her aunt's house for Quran lessons. Her brother Usman usually went with her but did not that evening. The family alerted the police at 9:30 p.m. (Arab News and the Press Trust of India gave the date of her disappearance as January 5; most sources give January 4.)
Her uncle, Mohammad Adnan, led the family's own search, and her sister told VICE that without him the family would have known nothing. CCTV footage found during the search showed Zainab walking down a narrow lane in her neighborhood, hand in hand with a man. The man in the footage had a beard.
On January 9 her body was found on a rubbish heap in Kasur, CNN said about 100 meters from where she was taken. The postmortem examination found that she had been strangled and raped before she was killed. Her father, back from Saudi Arabia, said the family would not bury her until justice was done, and criticized the police for being slow to act when she went missing.
On January 10, 2018, crowds in Kasur gathered outside the office of the deputy commissioner and attacked a police station. Police opened fire, and two people were killed. The Punjab government said four police officers and two civil defense personnel who had allegedly fired on the protesters were arrested. Protesters set fire to the homes of local politicians whom they blamed for doing nothing. NPR quoted a protest poster that read "we will seek accountability for all similar events in the past."
The case spread across the country under the hashtag #JusticeforZainab. Lawyers marched in Peshawar, activists held candlelit vigils in Islamabad, and protesters blocked a main road in Lahore, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Markets in Kasur stayed shut. The army's media wing said the chief of army staff condemned the "cold-blooded murder of innocent Zainab." Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif replaced the district police officer, ordered an inquiry, visited Zainab's parents on January 11, and offered a reward of 10 million rupees for information. NPR later reported that some prominent Pakistani women spoke publicly for the first time about abuse they had suffered as children, and that the child-protection charity Sahil said a few dozen families came forward to report abuse.
The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Mian Saqib Nisar, took suo motu notice of the case, an action the court can start on its own, on January 10. At the first hearing, on January 16, a three-member bench led by him said the killer appeared to be a serial offender and that failure to catch him would be a failure of the police and the government. Police told the court that 1,100 suspects had been questioned and the DNA of 400 people tested, and that four agencies, the Counter-Terrorism Department, the Intelligence Bureau, the Special Branch and the Punjab Forensic Science Agency, were working on the case without a breakthrough.
On Sunday, January 21, 2018, the parents of eight girls from Kasur appeared before the bench at the court's Lahore registry. Muhammad Idrees, the regional police officer of Multan, who headed the joint investigation team, reported that DNA tests had been done on 800 suspects and that the same man was responsible for all eight cases. The bench said the police could have saved the girls if they had taken the matter seriously in 2015, and asked why no one had looked into repeated incidents in the areas of only two police stations. It also criticized what it called a one-track investigation and told the police to look beyond DNA testing.
Investigators combined several methods, according to the Punjab government's account of the hunt. They ran search operations, used geo-fencing (analysis of which mobile phones had been in an area at a given time), examined the crime scene, enhanced the CCTV video, compared images against national identity card photographs of about 300,000 people held by NADRA, the national database authority, and gathered information from laborers and masons. The core of the effort was DNA. Sharif later said that 1,150 people's DNA had been profiled; the Lahore High Court later referred to 1,187 suspects. Earlier figures from the police were lower, as the testing was still under way.
Ali had been stopped once already. A senior police officer told AFP that he was detained a few days after the killing and released after denying involvement. Geo News reported that he was let go without a DNA test after his family vouched for him, and Sharif said he had claimed to have a heart attack during questioning. He then left Kasur for several days, going to Pakpattan, another town in Punjab. The man in the CCTV footage had a beard, and the prosecutor later told the court that Ali had shaved his off after the killing. The government said he often changed his appearance with a beard, spectacles or different clothes.
He was picked up again in door-to-door raids, on the district police officer's orders. His sample was collected on January 20 and profiled within two days. According to Dawn, the report released on January 20 showed that his DNA matched the samples from Zainab's body.
On the night of Tuesday, January 23, 2018, Sharif held a press conference in Lahore. "Our collective effort has borne fruit and the murderer has been arrested," he said, and he called Ali a "serial killer." He said the DNA match was "100 percent," and a forensic official at the press conference gave the random match probability as one in 178 quadrillion. Sharif said Ali had also admitted his actions in a polygraph examination, which was recorded on video, and that his DNA matched the samples from seven other girls attacked in the city. Geo News reported that he had been arrested near Pakpattan several days before the announcement. Residents surrounded his house in Kasur, and police in riot gear were sent to the area.
Asked whether the earlier victims could have been saved if the police had caught him sooner, Sharif said: "I agree with you 100pc, but this is a moment to appreciate." He promised a legal committee to help the families of the earlier victims, and said he would ask the Lahore High Court to make sure the case was tried quickly.
On January 24 Ali was brought before Judge Sajjad Ahmad of an anti-terrorism court in Lahore, who granted the police 14 days of physical remand (The Express Tribune reported 16). The prosecutor, Abdul Rauf Wattoo, told the court that a polygraph examination supported the police's claim that Ali lured children with promises of sweets.
Days after the arrest, a television anchor, Shahid Masood, said on his News One program that Ali was part of a child pornography ring run by powerful people, that he held more than 37 bank accounts, most in foreign currency, and that a federal minister was protecting him. The Supreme Court formed a three-member joint investigation team on January 29, led by Bashir Memon, director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, to test the claims. Its report, submitted in early March 2018, found that all 18 of Masood's claims were false or baseless. It found no evidence of foreign accounts, of any link to a politician or of any ring, and described Ali as a poor man.
The police submitted the charge sheet to the anti-terrorism court on February 9, 2018, charging Ali with the rape and murder of minor girls, including Zainab. The case was tried under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which requires a decision within seven working days, and the Lahore High Court ordered the trial to be held daily. On February 10 the Chief Justice closed the Supreme Court's suo motu proceedings and directed that the verdict be given within seven days of the indictment. For security, the trial was held inside Kot Lakhpat (Central) Jail in Lahore and in camera, with the media barred. A senior lawyer, Azam Nazir Tarar, told Dawn he had reservations about this, while noting that an appeal to the High Court would be treated as a continuation of the trial.
Ali was indicted on Monday, February 12, 2018, before Judge Sajjad Ahmad. AFP reported that day that he pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer, Mehar Shakeel Multani, said the police had made "baseless and false allegations against my client." The prosecution, led by Abdul Rauf Wattoo and overseen by the Punjab prosecutor general, Ehtesham Qadir, called witnesses from the next day: at least 56 in all, according to Dawn, including Zainab's uncle and her five-year-old brother. Its evidence included the CCTV footage, the DNA results, the polygraph examination and Ali's clothing. Qadir called it the first case to examine scientific evidence of this kind.
During the trial Ali changed course and confessed. The court gave him 40 minutes to think before he did so and warned him that what he said could be used against him. His full statement was recorded on February 14. In it, Gulf News reported, he described how he had lured the girls and where he had left their bodies, and confessed to the earlier killings of Ayesha, Iman Fatima, Noor Fatima and Laiba as well as Zainab. Multani, who had cross-examined at least 22 witnesses, then withdrew, saying his conscience would not allow him to go on defending Ali. The court appointed a state counsel, Muhammad Sultan, who cross-examined the remaining witnesses.
The hearings ended on Thursday, February 15. Dawn reported that the trial took four days, within the seven the High Court had allowed; AP described it as a five-day trial.
On Saturday, February 17, 2018, Judge Sajjad Ahmad gave his verdict inside the jail. He found Ali guilty and sentenced him to death on four counts: for kidnapping, for rape and for murder under sections 364-A, 376 and 302-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, and for an act of terrorism under section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997. He also received life imprisonment for an unnatural offense under section 377 and seven years for concealing the body under section 201, with fines; one million rupees was to go to Zainab's heirs. Dawn's corrected figure for the total fines was 4.1 million rupees, while later Dawn and Express Tribune reports gave a collective fine of 3.2 million rupees plus the one million in compensation.
Ehtesham Qadir told Voice of America that Ali had raped nine girls, seven of whom were killed and two of whom survived, and that DNA from the other girls' bodies had been matched to him. AP quoted him as saying that Ali "even today told the court that he killed the eight girls." AFP and Al Jazeera reported that Ali had confessed to eight attacks in all, including Zainab's, and that at least five of the other seven victims had been killed.
Zainab's father traveled to Kot Lakhpat to hear the verdict. "My daughter has gone, she will not come back, but I want to save daughters of other people," he told AP. He thanked the Chief Justice. Her mother said the sentences were not enough and asked that Ali be hanged in public at the place where he took Zainab.
Ali appealed to the Lahore High Court, saying the trial had been rushed, that legal procedure had not been followed and that he was not the real culprit. His pro bono lawyer, Asad Jamal, asked for more time, questioned whether DNA testing was foolproof, noted that the prosecution had accepted that the man in the CCTV footage only resembled Ali, and challenged the anti-terrorism court's jurisdiction. In a separate jail appeal, Ali asked for leniency because his confession had saved the court's time. A division bench of Justice Sadaqat Ali Khan and Justice Shahram Sarwar Chaudhry refused an adjournment and dismissed the appeal; Dawn and The Express Tribune reported the ruling on March 21, 2018. Justice Khan said that objections should not be raised when courts decide cases on time. "Justice has been done," Zainab's father said.
On June 12, 2018, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, Justices Asif Saeed Khosa, Manzoor Ahmed Malik and Mansoor Ali Shah, sitting at the Lahore registry, refused leave to appeal and upheld the death sentence. The court noted that Ali had pleaded guilty when the charges were framed and had given a detailed confession, corroborated by the CCTV footage, photographs, DNA tests and medical evidence. It called the crimes "absolutely horrendous and barbaric" and said that, given his admission of similar offenses against eight other minor girls, he did not deserve any sympathy in the matter of his sentences.
The cases of the other girls were tried by the same judge inside the same prison. On Saturday, August 4, 2018, the anti-terrorism court convicted Ali of the rape and murder of Ayesha, Laiba and Noor Fatima, whose cases had been registered at different times in 2017, and sentenced him to death on four counts in each case, 12 death sentences in all, under the same sections of the Penal Code and the Anti-Terrorism Act. He was also fined two million rupees and ordered to pay one million rupees in compensation to each family.
By October 2018, Dawn reported, seven cases had been registered against Ali, and the court had given verdicts in five of them, leaving two pending. Across those five cases he had been sentenced to death 21 times, given three life terms and a total of 23 years in prison, with further fines and diyat (compensation to the victims' families). The reports do not describe the fifth verdict, and none recorded a verdict in the killing of Iman Fatima.
On October 10, 2018, President Arif Alvi rejected Ali's mercy petition. Two days later, on October 12, the anti-terrorism court issued death warrants for October 17 and directed the superintendent of the Central Jail in Lahore to carry them out and report back.
Zainab's family had asked for a public hanging from the start. On Saturday, October 13, her father filed a petition in the Lahore High Court asking that the government be directed to hang Ali in public. His lawyer, Ishtiaq Chaudhry, relied on section 22 of the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997, which lets the government specify the manner, mode and place of execution having regard to its deterrent effect. "It is tantamount to setting an example if Imran is hanged publically," Amin Ansari said. On October 15 a division bench of Justice Sardar Shamim Ahmed and Justice Shehbaz Rizvi issued notice to the Punjab home secretary. The next day, October 16, the bench dismissed the petition as not maintainable. "You have come here late," Justice Shamim told the lawyer, noting that the execution was set for the following morning. Al Jazeera reported that the court ruled it was not its role to decide on a public hanging, and that the provincial government had already rejected a similar request as contrary to Pakistani law.
Late on October 16 the jail authorities arranged a last meeting between Ali and his relatives; Dawn put their number at about 57, and AP said the meeting lasted 45 minutes. Police and anti-riot units surrounded the prison.
Ali was hanged at Kot Lakhpat Central Jail in Lahore at about 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, October 17, 2018. "Imran was taken to the gallows just before dawn," a police official, Mohammad Afzal, told AP. Magistrate Adil Sarwar witnessed the execution, as did Zainab's father, her uncle, a doctor and the jail superintendent. Zainab's cousin, Muzammil Ansari, told Al Jazeera that Ali walked to the gallows without help, did not resist and did not ask the family for forgiveness. Amin Ansari said the authorities had not allowed the hanging to be shown live on television. "My daughter will not come back, but I am satisfied that we got justice," he told AP.
Ali's brother and two friends waited outside with an ambulance. His family took his body back to Kasur under police escort for burial.
Al Jazeera counted his execution as at least the 497th in Pakistan since the government lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in late 2014, after the attack on a school in Peshawar. It noted that rights groups object to the death penalty in Pakistan because of concerns about fair trials in an overloaded justice system.
The demand for change outlasted the execution. A bill named after Zainab was first tabled in the National Assembly by Asad Umar of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, but it lapsed when that assembly's term ended on May 31, 2018. The new government reintroduced it on April 24, 2019, and the National Assembly passed it on January 10, 2020, a date Dawn described as Zainab's second death anniversary. The Human Rights Minister, Shireen Mazari, who presented it, called the day "a big day." The Senate passed it with amendments on March 4, 2020, the National Assembly agreed to the amended text on March 11, and President Arif Alvi signed the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act on March 19, 2020, calling it "an excellent law for rapid response & recovery in cases of child kidnappings."
The Act set up the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Agency (ZARRA) to issue alerts for missing children, keep an online database of missing and abducted children, and coordinate with police and other agencies, working with the toll-free 1099 helpline. It requires investigations into the kidnapping, rape and murder of children to be completed within three months, provides for action against police who fail to respond to an alert within two hours, and sets a sentence of ten years to life, with a fine of up to one million rupees, for sexual abuse of children. A parliamentary committee rejected a proposal for the death penalty. At its passage the law was reported to apply only in the Islamabad Capital Territory, because law and order is a provincial matter; the Ministry of Human Rights now describes the Act as covering the four provinces and Islamabad. The ministry runs a Zainab Alert app under its AWAZ program for reporting missing children.
Proven in court and final: the kidnapping, rape and murder of Zainab Ansari, upheld by the Lahore High Court and the Supreme Court, with clemency refused. Proven at trial: the rape and murder of Ayesha, Laiba and Noor Fatima (August 4, 2018). No appeal in those three cases was reported; he was executed two and a half months later.
Linked, with no conviction reported: the killing of Iman Fatima, which the Punjab Forensic Science Agency matched to Ali's DNA and to which he confessed. Two further registered cases were reported as still pending in October 2018 and ended with his death.
The number of victims varies. Police and the Supreme Court spoke of eight cases including Zainab's; the chief minister said Ali's DNA matched seven other girls; the prosecutor said nine girls were raped, seven of them killed and two surviving; AFP and Al Jazeera said eight attacks, with at least five of the other seven victims killed; Dawn said at least nine rape-and-murder incidents; AP said he was convicted of killing eight children; The Express Tribune headlined "twelve other minors." Dawn's and Arab News's count of twelve incidents in a year refers to all similar cases in Kasur, not to cases proven against Ali.
Contested: the killing of Mudassar by police in February 2017. Police said he confessed and was shot while escaping; his family said he was killed without a DNA test; the DNA evidence later pointed to Ali. Officers were taken into custody, but the outcome of their case has not been reported. Dunya News also named an earlier suspect, Amanat, as killed in an encounter, a claim no stronger report has backed up.
False: the television claims that Ali belonged to a pornography ring, held dozens of foreign-currency accounts and was protected by a minister. A Supreme Court-appointed investigation team found all 18 claims baseless.
Details that differ between sources: Zainab's age (six or seven, occasionally eight); the date she went missing (January 4 in most sources, January 5 in some); Ali's age (23 or 24); the remand (14 or 16 days); the length of the trial (four days, or five in AP's account); the total fines in the Zainab case (4.1 million or 3.2 million rupees plus compensation); and the ages of the other girls.
2015: police later date the first of the linked cases of girls assaulted and killed in Kasur to this year. Separately, a child-abuse ring in Hussain Khanwala village is exposed.
January 7, 2017: Ayesha is found.
February 2017: Iman Fatima is abducted and found two days later (February 24 in some reports). Police arrest Mudassar, 21, and kill him the same day in an "encounter."
April 11, 2017: Noor Fatima is found.
July 8, 2017: Laiba is found.
November 2017: a six-year-old girl is found alive on a rubbish heap in Kasur.
January 4, 2018: Zainab Ansari leaves home for a Quran lesson and disappears; her parents are on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.
January 9, 2018: her body is found on a rubbish heap in Kasur.
January 10, 2018: two protesters are killed when police open fire in Kasur; the Chief Justice takes suo motu notice.
January 13, 2018: police say DNA links one man to at least seven cases.
January 16, 2018: first Supreme Court hearing.
January 20, 2018: Ali's DNA sample is collected; a report that day shows a match.
January 21, 2018: parents of eight girls appear before the Supreme Court in Lahore.
January 23, 2018: Shehbaz Sharif announces Ali's arrest.
January 24, 2018: Ali is remanded to police custody by an anti-terrorism court.
January 29, 2018: the Supreme Court forms a team to test a television anchor's claims.
February 9, 2018: charge sheet filed.
February 12, 2018: Ali is indicted at Kot Lakhpat Jail.
February 14, 2018: his full confession is recorded.
February 17, 2018: sentenced to death on four counts, with life imprisonment and seven years.
Early March 2018: investigation team reports that all 18 of the anchor's claims were false.
March 2018: the Lahore High Court dismisses his appeal (reported March 21).
May 31, 2018: the first Zainab Alert bill lapses with the end of the assembly's term.
June 12, 2018: the Supreme Court dismisses his appeal.
August 4, 2018: convicted and sentenced to death in the cases of Ayesha, Laiba and Noor Fatima.
October 10, 2018: President Arif Alvi rejects his mercy petition.
October 12, 2018: death warrants issued for October 17.
October 16, 2018: the Lahore High Court dismisses the public-hanging petition.
October 17, 2018: Imran Ali is hanged at Kot Lakhpat Central Jail, Lahore.
January 10, 2020: the National Assembly passes the Zainab Alert bill.
March 4, 2020: the Senate passes it with amendments.
March 19, 2020: President Alvi signs the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act.