KARACHI: A woman in Karachi said on Wednesday she wanted punishment for her husband after he burnt their 11-year-old son, Shaheer Khan, to death for not doing homework last week.
The boy’s mother, Shazia Nazir, said the incident happened on September 14 when she was unwell and resting in a corner of her residence.
She informed that her children had gathered in a room to study under the supervision of their father, Nazir Khan, who poured kerosene oil on Shaheer for not delivering his homework before setting him on fire.
“My eldest son, Shahzain, who is 15 years old, says his father must be punished or he will take matters into his own hands,” she told Arab News over the phone.
“When I saw Shaheer on fire and started shouting, his father put a blanket on him and rushed him to hospital,” she added. “While we were all deeply saddened by the incident, Shaheer’s father did not have tears in his eyes. He described it as an unintentional episode and thought he would get away with it.”
Asked about her husband, Shazia said he was quite aggressive and used to hit their children. At one point, he burnt the fingers of their eldest son for flying a kite.
She said after her son’s death, someone used her husband’s display picture on WhatsApp to spread the news on social media that he had killed Shaheer.
“Once we got the news on Sunday, September 18, we started investigating the matter and arrested Nazir Khan within one and a half hours,” Salim Khan, a police official, told Arab News.
He said the child’s mother was scared and had moved to her brother’s house. The residence of the family in the Orangi Town area was locked and no one was found there.
“We went to her brother Sajid’s house where the mother of the child gave her statement and filed the first information report against her husband,” Khan continued.
Gul Faraz Awan, the officer investigating the case, said Nazir Khan had admitted that he was guilty of setting his son on fire.
“He did not intend to kill the child,” Awan told Arab News on phone. “He was just threatening him. He regrets what happened and the court will decide his punishment. The case may lead to a compromise or settlement. Hopefully, he will be punished for what he has done.”
Speaking to Arab News, Shehzad Roy, a Pakistani celebrity and social activist, said it was important to change the mindset of people who resorted to physical punishment to discipline children.
“We changed the law against hitting children but the mindset is still the same,” he said while referring to his advocacy campaign against corporal punishment. “While working on it, I learnt that Section 89 allows beating children in good faith. It reflects the mindset that children are disciplined by hitting them.”
“It is really important to address these issues such as the mindset, educating children and parents as well as running campaigns in the society,” he continued. “However, everything will become irrelevant if we do not work on population management which is the root cause of these issues.”
Roy, who is currently the goodwill ambassador for the Population and Family Planning in Pakistan, said population management was ignored by everyone in the country and no one had turned it into a central issue in political or social campaigns.
