ON July 23, 2017, the Kasur correspondent for Dawn reported in a story carried as the lead in the paper’s Lahore Metropolitan section: Six months and 10 murders — all the deceased minors from ages five to 10, all of them raped and killed. And their bodies found in under-construction houses.

This story, which reported the killing of seven minor girls and three minor boys in Kasur in quick succession, was a whole five months and few days before the world shook in the aftermath of the Zainab murder in Kasur.

Explore: Is Kasur really the hub of child sexual abuse in Pakistan?

That this was the 10th incident of its nature must have been the reason behind the July 2017 story and its prominent placing in the paper. The double figure, it must have been thought, could perhaps shake those concerned into action and could lead to the capture of the ‘serial killer’.

If an investigation has to be undertaken to know why it took the law enforcers so long to get moving in Kasur, it must begin at the place of the crime’s occurrence.

Yes this is what the story said. It did, out of exuberance for it being by any measure a big news story or due to the emerging pattern of the crime, describe it as serial killing. It said “an eight-year-old girl was the 10th victim of this serial killing in the downtown of Kasur since January this year [2017]”.

In those 600-odd words were yet more clues that were crying out to be picked up by an average, overworked, unimaginative police brain.

The story said: “A-Division police, on July 8, found her body in an under-construction house...” An under construction house, right? This was long before the main suspect, caught after the Zainab murder, was identified as a construction worker. It can be presumed that, if it had registered with the investigator on the job then, the connection could have easily provided direction to the probe.

The construction site and the serial killer profile which were emphasised in the intro to the news story cited here popped up at various points throughout the report... “The serial killing started in January this year,” it was reported, “when a five-year-old girl, of Kot Peeran, was found gagged in an under-construction house. ... In February, the body of a minor girl of Ali Park was found in an under-construction house near her residence.”

Not just that, a journalist based in Kasur recalls that after this 10th incident of minors having been killed, he did actually express his suspicion about there being a possible link between the construction sites and a single perpetrator behind all these murders.

The warnings, the pleas, all went unheard until — according to one version — the picture of young Zainab sent the investigators scurrying around for evidence. The earlier protests couldn’t quite get things moving. (“After every killing, the public would resort to road protests and disperse after police’s assurance that the case would be resolved soon,” said the July 2017 story.)

This wasn’t all. To add more grimness and a sense of urgency to the message, the July 2017 newspaper flash referred to a recent incident that had highlighted the dangers lurking around the vulnerably young in Kasur. Yes, there was this essential mention of the “Husain Khanwala incident in which hundreds of children were abused, filmed and, later, blackmailed by local gangs some two years back”. Yet there was nothing which could assure the people that those in charge of providing justice to them were listening.

This was one instance of a newspaper highlighting the perils that held people in a whole town and beyond hostage. There were others equally important news items in other papers that have not been mentioned here for reasons of brevity. There were so many other newspapers reporting on this and other such cases with as much strength as they could muster in a situation which didn’t quite encourage pointing out dangers and injustices to the system minders hard of hearing.

The system does not listen until sometimes one man at the top with an avowedly kind heart and lots of authority decides to take notice of a wrong somewhere on his own. If an investigation has to be undertaken to know how and why it took the law enforcers so long to get moving in Kasur, all with their fancied gadgets and tired theories and the shoves and pushes of their bosses, it must begin at the place of the crime’s occurrence. It must begin in earnest at the level of what is called the jay-i-waqooa.

This is where exists your local journalist — until one day he is discovered by his fancied big-town peers out to use his services to crack a case on great public demand. Often working without salary and every now and then called out for claiming local privilege, there is this negative profile of the local journalist that everyone is so fond of discussing. A more positive, likable and mostly apt image of his is where he is fighting it out on behalf of the underprivileged — and for justice, without any worldly gains other than recognition and fame.

He is routinely frustrated in his quest by the official machinery which is unable to — which cannot — respond to his frequent pointings-out with the same alacrity and purpose. This lack of response in turn creates room for the fake, mythological stories spun to compensate for the real ones that have not been acted upon. This is where the doctored stories come in, where the 35 punctures and the 37 bank accounts enter the collective pool. These imaginative tales only emerge after the pleas that there is prima facie a case to be urgently heard fail to move the administrators of our lives and of justice.

This is not just about a small town, not about Kasur alone. It is about our ability to move, to solve cases by accepting evidence and building on it. The myths are natural to those who show similar apathy to solving Kasur as they do to meaningfully pursuing the ‘mysterious’ murder of Benazir Bhutto, or of Liaquat Ali Khan or of those killed by this hathora group or that chaqoo group. The ghosts will prevail unless we are ready to listen to the first cry of distress and committed to providing justice before and without high-profile intervention.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, February 2nd, 2018