SHEEMA Mangar, Sandra Ali and Neesa Lalita Gopaul are mere statistics on an unending list of victims – known and unknown, of man’s inhumanity to man – and woman, especially woman.
At the funeral of Neesa Gopaul Wednesday, there were hundreds of persons who went to give sympathy to the relatives; but which one of those many persons had enough sympathy to give to Neesa and make an intervention that may have saved her life?
Apart from her schoolfriends, who witnessed her decline and signs of battery and accompanied her to make a complaint to officials at the Child Protection Agency at the Ministry of Human Services, who cared enough to try to save her?
At the behest of her mother’s relatives her father converted to Islam and belonged to a Jamaat to which he made significant contributions, yet when he died his helpless daughters were abandoned to fate.
Child protection officials received serious complaints, yet the situation in which a minor was drugged, repeatedly raped, distanced from paternal relatives, her friends, and withdrawn from school and public scrutiny continued unabated, until the culmination of a natural progression of very evil intent and events.
Police, who went looking in a hotel room for drugs and witnessed first-hand another crime being committed, walked away without compunction from that crime scene which should have resulted in an immediate arrest.
At the time Neesa was yet under the age of consent and if the police had acted as they should have, then by now the man abusing her would have been incarcerated for statutory rape and Neesa might still be alive, albeit with an addiction to drugs.
This incident should be investigated and the offending ranks sanctioned, as should those who neglected to investigate Neesa’s charges of being forcibly drugged, abused and raped, despite her subsequent retraction, because she was a minor and should have been protected by the law against predators.
Neesa celebrated her 16th birthday on 16th September last.  It was the last month of her life, which had been poised on the cusp of womanhood and a brilliant future – a womanhood and a future that she was brutally robbed of, as was young Sheema Mangar.
Someone knows who Sheema Mangar’s killer is.  The police say that they have, yet in their custody, samples of fibre and other matter which they will send for DNA testing.
Too long, too much and too many – and the agony of the lambs continues unabated, their screams silenced by the conspiracy propelled by expediency, and the rank inhumanity submerging the human condition.
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