Students were gathering in order to plan a “farewell party” when their classmate sprang on English language professor Khalid Hameed and began to stab him in the stomach. While the others rushed to their teacher’s assistance and tackled their classmate to the ground, Hameed’s wounds were already too severe, and he died en route to the hospital. Tragically, he was scheduled to retire in just four months.
“My father then fell down and I rushed to him; the student held his knife and started shouting ‘I have killed him, I had told him that a gender mix reception is against Islam’,”Hameed’s son Waleed Khan, who had dropped his father off at the office and witnessed the attack, told AFP. In a cruel twist, he revealed his father wasn’t even involved in organizing the event.
A note has been making the rounds on social media which was allegedly written by a group of students enraged over the decision to include women in the get-together. Local channel Samaa TV says that male and female students were supposed to take part in a folk dance, and the group fumed that it was “promoting vulgarity,” claiming that “Islam doesn’t allow it.”
While police were still checking if the attacker was a member of any extremist group, they said he considered the dance to be “un-Islamic.”
“Apparently, the accused has no link to any religious group but we are investigating about his past and the reasons behind his mindset,” said local police representative Farhan Hussain. The student is currently in police custody, and will be charged with murder.
The attack took place at Sadiq Egerton College in Bahawalpur, a school where women outnumber men two-to-one, a rarity in the conservative Pakistani education system. Several women on Twitter saw the murder as an expression of the country’s deep-rooted discriminatory attitude.
