© B.K. Bangash/APIn this Jan. 18, 2018, photo, posters reading ‘protest’ are seen on the walls of a neighbourhood of seven-year old Zainab Ansari in Kasur, Pakistan.
Zainab's death has even given birth to a nascent Pakistani version of #MeToo movement.
A number of prominent Pakistani women have come forward with their own stories of sexual assault, saying they want to change traditions that consider abuse as a mark of shame for the victim. Those traditions, they say, help predators get away with abuse and encourage an already corrupt police force to ignore such crimes.
Maheen Khan, a legendary Pakistani fashion designer, tweeted that she had been sexually abused as a child by an Islamic cleric who taught her the Qur'an. "I froze in fear day after day," she tweeted. At 73, Khan has spoken publicly only once before of the abuse.
"We are now saying enough is enough. We should have woken up long ago," she said in a telephone interview from her home in the southern city of Karachi. "I am ashamed to say it has taken this one little girl's death."
"What disturbs me the most is the silence when a little girl gets raped," she said. "It has to do with the honour of family. Parents tell their daughters: 'Don't talk about it. Don't tell anyone.' Our silence is saying it is all right to sexually molest a child."
The horror of Zainab's killing was brought home for Pakistanis by a photo of her that went viral on social media, showing the smiling girl in her favourite bright pink coat, with a pink barrette holding back her hair. TV channels aired the photo alongside pictures of her lifeless body abandoned on a heap of garbage in her home city of Kasur.
Across Pakistan, thousands protested, condemning police inaction and blaming the government for failing to protect children.
Comment: The protests have resulted in at least two deaths and several injuries as police have been filmed shooting at protesters to disperse them:
"Whenever anybody saw her picture on social media or on electronic media everybody started weeping," said Waqas Abid, a lawyer in Kasur who heads an activist group called the Good Thinkers Organization. "Everybody was self-motivated to come out from his or her house and ask for justice for Zainab."
The Senate's Standing Committee on the Interior, which oversees policing, launched an inquiry this week into the sexual assaults in Kasur, as well as into another recent attack in another part of the country - the rape and killing of a 4-year-old named Asma, whose body was left in a field near her home in Kyhber Pukhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan.
Kasur is a congested district of around 2.5 million people in eastern Pakistan, near the border with India. The city of Kasur is surrounded by brick kilns and tanneries and has hundreds of small factories making shoes and embroideries, all of which employ children - making them vulnerable to abuse. In 2015, an extensive child pornography ring was uncovered in the city; it had been flourishing for nearly a decade and involved nearly 250 children, some of whom were forced at gunpoint to have sex.
Zainab was snatched in early January as she walked to a Qur'an class. Her parents were away on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, and the girl and her two sisters and brother were watched over by her aunts and uncles who all live in the same house in an impoverished neighbourhood of narrow lanes on the outskirts of the city.
"I told Zainab often to be careful," her mother, Nusrat Ansari, said. Wrapped in a large shawl obscuring her face, she held Zainab's photo, describing how she loved to play games with her cousins. Her favourite was hide and seek.
Her father, Mohammed Amin Ansari, denounced police for failing to warn residents about a serial killer in the city. "People don't talk about sexual abuse," he said.
Comment: The parents of the child are also justifiably outraged at the police, claiming they "didn't do anything" after relatives reported the disappearance of their daughter.
"While they didn't do anything, my friends and family spent day and night looking for my daughter. In Pakistan, security is only for leaders and we are just common insects."
It was only after the shock over Zainab that news emerged of other children abducted and raped in Kasur. Amid the uproar, police did testing on the victims and found the same DNA on eight of the children, all but one of whom was killed. Police now say they are hunting for a serial rapist-killer.
On Tuesday, authorities announced the arrest of a suspect in Zainab's killing. The spokesman for the Punjab provincial government, Malik Ahmed Khan, identified the suspect as Mohammed Imran and said he was arrested near Kasur.
Comment: Two more suspects have been arrested in the case. All of the suspects were living in a house near the site where Zainab's body was found.
The suspects were arrested in the identification of Umar Farooq, who was arrested near Bhatta Chowk on Wednesday by Lahore Police. The suspect had been handed over to the JIT for further investigations. The suspect's mobile data showed him to be in Kasur at the time when Zainab went missing. Earlier, he had also confessed to killing a minor after raping her.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the same suspect is linked to the deaths of the eight other children. After the announcement, Zainab's father demanded in an interview with a local television that the culprit be hanged.
Among the eight victims was 5-year-old Ayesha. Her father, Mohammed Asif, said he pleaded with the police to find her after her abduction last year.
"They had no interest. They were more interested in keeping it quiet," he told The Associated Press. Her body, showing signs of rape and torture, was found two days after her disappearance.
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