Imran Ali Arrested in the Murder of Six-Year-Old Zainab Amin in Kasur
Punjab's chief minister said the 23-year-old neighbour's DNA matched the crime scene, after samples from 1,150 people were profiled.
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On January 4, 2018, six-year-old Zainab Amin left her family's house in the Road Kot area of Kasur, in Pakistan's Punjab province, to go to religious lessons at her maternal aunt's home a few minutes away. Days later her body was found on a rubbish heap. The autopsy found she had been strangled, and suggested she had been raped before she was killed. The day she was found, protesters filled the streets of Kasur, furious at what they saw as police inaction, and her name became a national cause.
On the night of January 23, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif told a press conference in Lahore that the man suspected of killing her had been arrested. He was Imran Ali, 23, who lived in the same neighbourhood, very close to the aunt's house. DNA samples had been profiled from 1,150 people, Sharif said, and Ali's matched the samples taken from the crime scene. The director general of the Punjab Forensic Science Agency said Ali's sample had been collected on January 20 and profiled in two days, and put the random match probability of his profile at one in 178 quadrillion.
He had been in police hands before. Police sources told DawnNews that Ali was picked up early in the investigation and let go, and that he then left Kasur; Sharif said he had pleaded a heart attack under questioning. A Punjab government spokesman, Malik Ahmed Khan, said he was finally arrested in Pakpattan and that, according to police, he often changed his appearance, wearing a beard at one time and spectacles at another. Sharif said Ali had "accepted all of his deeds" during a polygraph test that day. Police had already said on January 13 that DNA results pointed to one culprit in at least seven similar cases in the district over the past year. Earlier on the day of the announcement, a crowd had gathered around Ali's house in Kasur, and police in riot gear were sent to keep order.
"If the law allows, he should be hanged at the square," Sharif said. Zainab's father, Muhammad Amin, thanked the provincial and federal authorities and said he was satisfied with the result of the investigation.
What this story covers. It draws on Dawn's report of January 23, 2018, on the chief minister's press conference. Ali was a suspect when it was written; the links to other killings in the district rested on officials' statements about DNA, and the other children are not named here. Zainab's age is given as six, as Dawn reported it; some outlets said seven. Ali was later sentenced to death for her kidnapping, rape and murder, and was hanged in Lahore on October 17, 2018.
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- October 17, 2018: Pakistan Hangs Imran Ali for the Rape and Murder of Zainab in Kasur