8 years ago
Friday, September 13, 2013
Man Drowned Child For Being A Girl
A Pakistani man,Umar Zaib, has confessed to drowning his 18-months-old child just for beign a girl and says he now regrets his actions.
His family says it was because he wanted a son, but it highlights the grave issue, across the country and the region of South Asia, of female infanticide.
Reporter met the family in Lahore and the 28-year-old Umar Zaib as he waits, shackled, outside court.
"It was a mistake," he says. "I made a big mistake. I don't know what was going through my mind when I did it."
Umar Zaib is talking of the crime he committed against his daughter, Zainab, who was just one-and-a-half years old.
Then the police jostle him and push him towards the courtroom. He is under arrest and yet to be charged but has admitted to the police that he drowned his daughter.
He insisted it was all because of a fit of rage. But when he described the horrors of what happened, Umar Zaib's wife told us a very different story.
"It was late at night but my husband told me we all had to visit his sister, but we stopped close to the river," says Sumera, 24.
"I had both our daughters with me. My husband told me I wasn't holding Zainab properly and he took her from me."
"In front of my eyes, he threw her in the river, i was helpless, I started crying, Zainab was screaming in the water but when I tried to save her he beat me.
The disturbingly prevalent tendency, across this region, to kill babies purely because they are female is been well-documented.
The United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, has a team dedicated to the issue in Pakistan.
It says girls are murdered primarily because of cultural pressures and poverty. But for years, rights groups in Pakistan have also accused law enforcement agencies of not taking the issue seriously.
"Yes, of course cases like that happen in Pakistan," says Basharat Ali, the investigating police officer in Zainab's murder case.
But then he suggests that Zainab's mother has questions to answer too.
"How can a mother, who sees someone else throw her daughter in the river, just leave quietly and not report it for a week?"
He may be behind bars now, he may even have admitted to killing his daughter, but in Pakistan there are no guarantees Umar Zaib will be properly punished as have previous cases, for killing his child, apparently just for being a girl.
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