Published: March 25, 2012
Fakhra Younus commits suicide on March 17 by jumping off her sixth floor residence in Rome, Italy.
ROME: The long standing and once highly publicised case of acid victim Fakhra Younus met its tragic end on March 17 when she jumped to her death in the Italian city of Rome. Her body is due to reach Karachi on Sunday, Express News reported.
Yunus, wife former Member of Provincial Assembly Bilal Khar, had been undergoing treatment for acid scarred tissue, including multiple corrective surgeries in Rome.
Khar, son of former Punjab governor and Pakistan Peoples Party leader Ghulam Mustafa Khar, had attacked Yunus with acid in 2000 after she had left him. The two had shared a troubled marriage dotted with domestic violence.
On March 17, she leapt off from the sixth floor of a building. Her body was expected to arrive in Karachi via air on March 25.
Bilal Khar should be severely punished: Altaf Hussain
Meanwhile Muttahida Qaumi Movement(MQM) chief Altaf Hussain has demanded for Yunus’ assailant, Khar, to be brought to book and be severely punished according to the law.
In a statement, issued shortly after news of her death was aired, Hussain said that Khar was responsible for her death since his act had emotionally scarred her, leading to her eventual suicide.
Hussain added that MQM would support Yunus’ family in getting justice.
The case
In 1998, Yunus was an 18 year old resident of Napier Road’s Bulbul Bazar, Karachi’s red light district, when she met the then Muzaffargarh MPA Bilal Khar.
They both got married after a six month relationship. This was Bilal’s third marriage, while Yunus had a three year old son from an earlier liaison.
Little did Yunus know, that this was not meant to be her fairytale marriage, since shortly after the marriage, she faced both physical and mental abuse by Khar, which lasted for three years before she eventually escaped and moved in with her mother.
An infuriated Khar, with his bruised ego, took ‘revenge’ by pouring acid over her on May 14, 2000, as her five year old son watched. The attack left her severely burned, particularly her face. She, however, survived the attack but not before spending three months in intensive care.
Khar used his political influence to evade arrest and absconded, while Yunus’s family faced difficulty in registering an FIR against him.
On October 31, 2002, Khar was eventually arrested, but released in 2003 on Rs 200,000 bail.
In Yunus’ time of despair, social activist Tehmina Durrani came to the forefront to assist her. Durrani, ironically, was once married to Ghulam Mustafa Khar.
After the then government showed reluctance in helping Yunus, Durrani convinced the Italian government to help her, by not only providing asylum but also sponsoring her treatment there. Khar, leveraging his influence, had vehemently tried to stop her exit from Pakistan, but failed.
After over a decade of undergoing treatment in Italy, an emotionally scarred Fakhra, lost hope and committed suicide by jumping out of her sixth floor residence.
Khar currently resides in his ancestral home in Kot Addu.
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Acid thrower?: Bilal Khar denies accusations, pleads innocence
By Ferya Ilyas
Published: March 25, 2012
Denying that he ever threw acid on his deceased wife Fakhra Yunus, former MPA Bilal Khar said he was not even in Karachi at the time when the incident took place.
“I was in Lahore when this happened and I read about it in a newspaper,” Bilal said.
Speaking to Express News, Bilal accused the “ladies”, who helped Fakhra take refuge in Italy of establishing a false case against him “just to earn money” from humanitarian organisations.
“They got my name involved because they knew they would get funds only if a big name was involved in the case,” he accused.“The entire case was built around the bad wadera notion; she couldn’t back out,” he said, adding that she would not have been allowed to live in Italy.
“Acid-throwing incidents are very common in Pakistan but do you see any media trial done against those accused like it is done against me? Media is doing so only because I am a known person,” he said.“Do you think I am a thug or what?” he questioned.
“I had spent time in jail, I had fought the case against me and the judiciary declared me innocent. If I’m still a culprit then your judiciary was wrong,” he added.
“I had verbally given her divorce but the documentation was not done,” he said, adding that before he could do anything he was already named in that case as an accused.
Bilal said “If Fakhra had to commit suicide because of me, she would have done it 12 years ago.”
“Fakhra left for Italy from my house, my father was present there too,” he claimed.
Bilal mentioned that Tehmina Durrani had agreed to help Fakhra for further surgeries abroad. “Fakhra and I were not in favour of this arrangement,”
Bilal accepted he avoided case investigation because “the incident happened during Pervez Musharraf’s government and my father was the only politician who was opposing his rule, hence I expected no justice.”
However, Bilal added that he was arrested and was tried.
“The petitioners [Fakhra’s family] had themselves stated in the court that I was not involved,” Bilal said. He further added that the physical description of the attacker provided by Fakhra’s family didn’t match to what he looks like.
Framing the ‘bad wadera’?
Responding to the fact that Fakhra had always blamed Bilal for the crime, the former MPA said she had no choice.
Rejecting the claim that he had pressurised Fakhra’s family to take back the case against him, Bilal said he had no power over this.
Questions for the MQM
While criticising MQM’s current agitation regarding the incident, he questioned why Governor of Sindh Dr Ishratul Ebad Khan who was in power when he was declared innocent in the case, had not protested along with other MQM members against the court decision at that time.
When asked why he himself had not filed a case for his wife, Bilal said Fakhra was not his wife then.
‘Financial woes led to suicide’
He claimed that the real reason behind the suicide was her financial situation.
“The money she received from the Italian government was very little and the rest of the money was usurped by her well-wishers who fought the fake case against me,” he alleged.
The former MPA also raised the question if he was the attacker, why did Fakhra live with him for four months after the incident.
he added.
He also said that he had not maintained contact with her, nor did he financially support her.
Requesting media to be considerate towards him, Bilal argued that “I have three daughters and they are harassed at school because of this.”
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Fakhra Yunas, left, and Tehmina Durrani in Rome, where Fakhra will undergo extensive surgery
GUIDO HARARI/CONTRASTO FOR TIME
The walls of Tehmina Durrani's baronial home in Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, are lined with both mirrors and Durrani's own cool-hued paintings of women flying, dancing, sleeping, gazing dreamily�lovely nudes in ethereal settings. Four months ago, a strange houseguest started drifting uncertainly through the elegant rooms, her head and face shrouded by a dark brown head-scarf. She stared at the paintings but took pains to avoid all those mirrors, explaining that she was afraid of herself.
The visitor was Fakhra Yunas, a 21-year-old former dancing girl who fulfilled the Pakistani equivalent of the American Dream�marriage into a rich and powerful family�only to have her life virtually destroyed. Host Durrani was born into wealth and advantage and was a glamorous politician's wife�until she went public with her own tale of victimhood. And so, Durrani and Fakhra became a team: privileged protector and wounded ward, trying to repair some of the damage done to Fakhra's life. They have also become twin avengers determined to rip the veil from the cruelty and hypocrisy present in the upper echelons of Pakistani society. This is their story.
Last April, Fakhra was napping in her mother's home on Napier Rd., the seedy red-light section of Karachi, the country's rough-and-tumble commercial hub. It was a great distance�in every way�from what she had hoped for when she married Bilal Khar, now 36, a former politician and scion of one of Pakistan's best-known families. Five days earlier, after enduring constant physical abuse by her husband during three years of marriage, she had returned home.
Now, Fakhra was roused from her nap by the sound of Khar calling her name. He pushed back her head and poured liquid on her face. She thought he was forcing her to drink something. Fakhra wiped her eyes and saw her husband run from the room. She started to follow and looked down to see her clothes dissolving into her skin. Naked and suddenly burning all over, she collapsed, screaming. She had no idea what had happened to her.
In Urdu, they call it tez ab, or sharp water. Acid, nitric or hydrochloric, has long been the weapon of retribution for Pakistani men against disloyal, disobedient or overly determined women. One reason is that acid is cheap and readily available. Another: surviving an acid attack is often worse than dying. The acid burned the hair off Fakhra's head, fused her lips, blinded one eye, obliterated her left ear and melted her breasts.
More than a year after the attack, the once full-lipped, large-eyed, long-haired beauty is unrecognizable. She breathes with difficulty. "I don't look human anymore," she says. "My face is a prison for me." When four-year-old son Nauman first visited his mother in the crowded public hospital where for three agonizing months she fought for her life, he ran away crying: "This is not my mother!"
Fakhra was born in the Napier Rd. red-light district. Her mother is a heroin addict, and Fakhra began work as a nautch (dancing girl) at age 11. The nautch tradition goes back centuries in certain parts of the subcontinent; sometimes the dancing girls are legitimate performers, often they're prostitutes. Fakhra started sex work immediately after she began menstruating. A customer bought her virginity for $2,000, a set of gold jewelry and a Rado watch. "Whatever you're going to do," she told him, "do it quickly because I want to go home!"
At 18, already the mother of three-year-old Nauman, she met Khar at a party in Karachi. "I thought he was a very big, rich, generous man," Fakhra recalls. "Why should I not catch him?" At the start, he impressed Fakhra by paying $340 to simply stay with her and talk. "Your face is so innocent," he said. "I like you so much." Fakhra had never encountered anyone like him. "I thought, 'What a man,'" she recalls. "'He hasn't done anything to me and he's so handsome.'"
By marrying Khar, Fakhra ascended into one of the most recognizable families in the country. Khar's father, Ghulam Mustafa Khar, is a major landowner and property is still the primary source of power and wealth in Pakistan. The Khars rule their area of Punjab province as feudal lords. Mustafa Khar was once dubbed the "Lion of the Punjab" after a massive election victory, and served as the Chief Minister and Governor of the province in the 1970s. Son Bilal treated his new, second wife as a possession, and beat her severely when she displeased him. When she abandoned him, he took his revenge with acid.
After three months, Fakhra was released from the hospital and a grotesque reconciliation took place. Fakhra returned to Khar, who kept her hidden away in cheap hotels and brought her for a time to his family farm, where she was put to work in the kitchen. Khar insisted that he loved her�but his abuse did not stop. After six months, the exhausted and fragile woman decided to break her chains. Although her life as a woman largely ended the day of the acid attack, Fakhra, after the doctors surgically separated her fused lips, was able to talk, could still walk and, most importantly, found the will to live. Desperate, she sent an sos message to Durrani, whom she had once met.
If anyone could empathize with Fakhra, it was Durrani. She was the sixth wife of the Lion of the Punjab. She helped raise Bilal Khar, Fakhra's husband, and, at age 36, the younger Khar still refers to her as "Mummy." Durrani detailed her life with the Khars in a 1991 autobiography called My Feudal Lord, and it is a hair-raising tale. The elder Khar beat Durrani, kidnapped their children, had a rip-roaring affair with her youngest sister and once forced Durrani to strip naked when she disobeyed his orders. Domestic abuse is routinely swept under the carpet in Pakistan; Durrani's book put it in the headlines both domestically and abroad. My Feudal Lord has been translated into 36 languages and Durrani continues to receive awards and recognition overseas for her courage�although within her own country she is branded an opportunist and publicity-hound. Following the book's publication, her parents disowned her because of its unsavory revelations.
Durrani had heard of Fakhra's plight shortly after the acid attack, but was reluctant to interfere. "I never wanted to get involved with this family again," she says. But after meeting Fakhra, she found it impossible to turn her back�especially after recalling how Mustafa Khar had threatened to disfigure her with acid years before. "Fakhra," she says, "could have been me."
As a result, she has rejoined the battle against the Khars. After Fakhra moved into Durrani's house, the younger Khar began making daily threats over the telephone. "First I will shoot your mother in the knees with a 12-bore gun so she crawls," Khar told Durrani's son Ali, his half-brother. "She's become too used to standing up. No one will be able to catch me." Given the power of the Khar family, that is probably true. In their ancestral village of Kot Addu, Durrani explains in My Feudal Lord, "the Khars were the law." Fakhra's family filed a complaint with the Karachi police after the acid attack, but no arrest was ever made. When Durrani heard in July that Bilal Khar was trying to bribe Fakhra's family to withdraw the complaint, she confronted them. "Do not fear him," she warned the family. "Fear me!" (The complaint remains in force.) Durrani wants justice. "I'm looking for accountability," she says. "Fakhra is a symbol of the disorder of my country and any other Muslim country where women don't have a voice."
Bringing acid attackers like Bilal Khar to trial is Durrani's long-term goal. Her immediate concern has been to restore a semblance of physical normality to Fakhra�which will take at least three years and an estimated 30 operations, after which her face and upper body should be restored. When she received a courage award in April from the Milan-based Sant'Angelica cosmetics firm, Durrani brought Fakhra's case to the company's attention and it offered to underwrite the cost of her reconstructive surgery. The next challenge was to procure a national ID card for Fakhra so she would be eligible for a passport to travel to Italy for the operation. A technicality held up the process until Durrani marched into the office of Pakistan's Interior Minister, retired Lieut. General Moinuddin Haider, known as a progressive and no-nonsense official. The minister's response, Durrani says, was that publicizing Fakhra's case abroad would sully Pakistan's reputation. (Haider's office says the minister "assured his cooperation for her [Fakhra's] Fakhra's] departure abroad.") Durrani went over his head to the office of President Pervez Musharraf, and secured the passport.
Fakhra's pain may never cease. She is in Italy awaiting surgery, learning to speak Italian and getting used to a foreign land that will be her home for the foreseeable future. "I not only have hope," she says, "but I also have strength." Durrani hopes when Fakhra is ready to return home, she can do so in safety. One thing she does not tolerate is Fakhra's shunning of mirrors. "I made her remove her veil and look at herself," Durrani says firmly. "Fakhra's face is the crime of a man against a woman. It is not shame for her." The shame resides back in Pakistan�where a powerful man's unpunished rage can scar forever a woman's life.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,170879,00.html#ixzz1qALwlnG2
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