Zainab Ansari, six, was raped and murdered by a serial killer in Kasur, east Pakistan, in 2018
The brutal killing of Zainab Ansari, six, sparked outrage across Pakistan in 2018, which has since seen an increase in incidents of rape.
Her body was left in a rubbish dump in Kasur, east Pakistan, by serial killer Imran Ali, 24, who was later sentenced to death and hanged.
She was snatched in early January as she walked to a Koran class.
CCTV footage showed her being led away by a suspect five days before she was found raped and strangled on a rubbish pile about a mile from her home.
An angry mob surrounded the house of Ali shortly after he was arrested and in October he was handed a death sentence after admitting to her murder as well as six other girls.
He was executed in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat prison.
The case was the first among a catalogue of brutal gang rapes and murders seen across the country in recent years.
In April last year, a woman who was gang-raped in Uch Sharif accused a police officer of raping her in a further attack when she went to report the crime. The policeman was later arrested.
A transgender person from Kamalia was dragged out of a car before being tortured and raped by two men later that year.
Four transgender people, from Kamalia in Pakistan, were booked for a festival show at the Mai Maseet Wali Mela near the village Dhoop Sari, on September 20.
They were driving to the city of Jhang when five men intercepted and pulled one of the group to a nearby farmhouse, around 2am.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has called for violent sex offenders to be hanged or chemically castrated amid outcry over the gang rape of a woman in the country in September this year
Two raped one of the passenger’s while three armed men were on guard.
The victim was later dropped 20 kilometres away in Sahiwal, where they were then collected by colleague Binyamin who was at the festival venue.
The pair reported the incident to Harappa police who were ‘reluctant’ to act on the case, according to Binyamin.
Police arrested five suspects and two of them were nominated.
More recently, a 14-year-old girl died during an abortion six months in to her pregnancy after being repeatedly raped by an uncle.
The girl, identified by local media as Uzma, began living with her maternal aunt and her husband Ghulam Anwar.
A vehicle carries Abid Malhi, one of the suspects in the gang rape of a woman on a desolate highway, following his court appearance in Lahore, Pakistan, on Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Uzma became pregnant and died in September this year after she was raped by Anwar repeatedly.
He and his wife were arrested by Okara police in October after Uzma’s father registered a complaint.
In the same month, two men were arrested for the gang rape of a woman in front of her children on a motorway Lahore.
Abid Malhi was finally arrested after a monthlong manhunt following the high-profile rape in September.
The other suspect, Shafqat Ali, was arrested a week after the assault.
Police had earlier said the woman had locked her car doors when she ran out of fuel on the road in the province of Punjab, where Lahore is the capital, and dialed for help.
But the two men, who were armed, broke a car window and dragged her outside where they raped her.
The attack shocked Pakistan and galvanized women’s rights activists, especially after a senior Punjab police officer, Umar Sheikh, blamed the victim for being alone at night in the car with her two children and for running out of fuel.
On November 10, Rafiq Malik was arrested for the kidnapping and gang-raping of a mother and her four-year-old daughter in Kashmore, a district in Pakistan’s Sindh province.
Police continue to search for his two accomplices.