‘Please make sure this doesn’t happen again’ Pakistan/US
Sabika Sheikh spoke to her 9-year-old sister on the phone Friday, counting down the days before she would complete her high school exchange program in suburban Houston and return to the family home in Karachi, Pakistan.
‘‘She told me that in 20 days we will be together,’’ said the sister, Soha. ‘‘She had bought so many gifts for me.’’
Hours later, America’s cycle of campus gun violence reverberated thousands of kilometres away when a 17-year-old junior opened fire at Sabika’s high school in Santa Fe, Texas, killing her and nine others.
The 17-year-old Pakistani exchange student was ‘‘the lifeline of our family,’’ her father, Aziz Sheikh, said in a phone interview yesterday. The eldest of three siblings from a middle-class section of the port city Karachi, Sabika was a ‘‘brilliant student’’ who had dreams of joining the Pakistani foreign service, he said.
She was due to return to Karachi on June 9, and the family was planning to spend a summer vacation travelling across the country visiting relatives.
Her father said Sabika was looking forward to observing the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began last week and is marked by prayer, daylong fasts and family meals.
‘‘She was a great soul,’’ he said. Sheikh said his daughter regularly placed among the top three students in her classes in Pakistan before she began the exchange program last August. In a photo circulated on social media, Sabika is smiling and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘‘Texas’’. The manager of the Kennedy-Lugar YES exchange program, Megan Lysaght, sent a letter to students saying the program was ‘‘devastated by this loss and we will remember Sabika and her families in our thoughts and prayers.’’ Pakistan knows campus violence. Islamist militants who view the country’s education system as un-Islamic have targeted hundreds of schools over the past decade, with the deadliest attack coming in 2014, when gunmen killed more than 140 people, mostly students, at an armyrun school in the northern city of Peshawar.
Sabika’s uncle, Ansar Sheikh, described the Texas shooting as an act of terrorism and pleaded with the US government to take action.
‘‘I don’t blame the murder of my girl on American society but on that terror- ism mindset that is there in all societies. We need to fight it all over the world,’’ he said.
‘‘I do ask the American government to make sure weapons will not be easily available in your country to anybody. Please make sure this doesn’t happen again. It really hurts.’’
Sabika’s middle sibling, Ali, described her as his best friend.
Sheikh said he had received condolence calls from US ambassador to Pakistan David Hale, and Pakistani authorities in the United States.
‘‘As an exchange student, Sabika was a youth ambassador, a bridge between our peoples and cultures,’’ Hale said in a statement. ‘‘All of us at the US mission in Pakistan are devastated by and mourn her loss.’’ – LA