Slain Pakistani Student’s Family: ‘We Thought She Would Be Safe’

SANTA FE, TX — Half a world away in Pakistan, members of Sabika Sheikh’s family were looking forward to her June 9 return for Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Instead, they prepared to receive her body at an airport in Karachi, Pakistan, early Tuesday morning. The 17-year-old, who had come to America to study under a State Department-funded program that fosters better understanding of Muslim culture, was among 10 people killed in Friday’s Santa Fe High School massacre.

An aspiring diplomat who wanted to be a voice for women of her faith, Sabika embraced the idea of studying in America, far from the violence wrought by militant extremists who have disrupted the educations of hundreds of thousands of children, particularly girls. In cruel irony, Sabika's life was cut short in a seemingly endless cycle of school shootings in America.

A funeral prayer service for Sabika was held Sunday at the Masjid Sabireen mosque in Stafford, located not far from Santa Fe. It was a brief service that gave her Texas host family and other mourners who filled the overflowing mosque a chance to remember and say goodbye to Sabika before her casket was whisked away to the airport. She will be buried in the port city of Karachi after her body is repatriated, likely on Wednesday.

“You imagine what it’s like for her parents — all their hopes and dreams wrapped up in this child,” Farha Ahmed, an attorney from Sugarland, told The Washington Post as he prepared to mourn Sabika. “And the next time they will see her, she’ll be in a casket.”

Sabika’s family had expected to see her alive. She spoke to her 9-year-old sister, Soha, just days before the Santa Fe school shooting.

“She told me that in 20 days, we will be together,” Soha told The Los Angeles Times. “She had brought so many gifts for me.”

Sabika was the oldest of four children. Her brother, Ali, told The Times she was his best friend.

“She asked me to make sure her room was neat and clean when she came back,” he told Pakistani news media. “She had also asked our mother to cook her favorite dishes on June 9.”

Sabika’s father, Aziz Sheikh, told the Associated Press his daughter was “extraordinary, genius and talented.”

“My daughter never came fourth [in class] — only ever first, second, or third,” he said, adding: “At such a young age, she would say such huge things, that sometimes I couldn't believe it. Even now I cannot believe that my daughter is gone.”

To The Times, he called her “the lifeline of our family” and a “great soul.”

Sabika’s parents were aware of school shootings in America, but thought she would be safer abroad than in Pakistan, where extremist militants view education as a threat to Islam. In the deadliest of the Pakistani Taliban attacks in 2014, militants killed 141 people, 132 of them children, at an army-run school in Peshawar. In 2012, Taliban gunmen boarded a bus and shot 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, a young activist who demanded that girls be allowed to receive educations. She survived her head wound and went on to become the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

“We were confident that Sabika will be very much safe there,” Sabika’s great uncle, Abdul Jalil Albasit told NPR.

Pakistanis struggled to understand the Santa Fe shooting.

Akbar Durrani, a 40-year United Nations employee speaking with NPR from an upscale market in Islamabad, said the idea that a Pakistani student would be killed in an American school shooting was unfathomable.

“It seems like it wouldn't happen to people who go to the U.S.,” Durrani said. “But this time around, it kind of hit home that it could happen to anyone.”

Madiha Kausar-Butt, a homemaker strolling through the market, said that “even in America now, you don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Ansar Shikh, another of Sabika's uncles, told The Los Angeles Times that school shooting that killed his niece and others in America should be regarded as acts of terrorism.

“I don't blame the murder of my girl on American society but on that terrorism mindset that is there in all societies,” Ansar Shikh said. “We need to fight it all over the world.

“I do ask the American government to make sure weapons will not be easily available in your country to anybody,” he said. “Please make sure this doesn't happen again. It really hurts.”

RELATED:

• Texas School Shooting: Family Of Accused Gunman 'Stunned'
• Gov. Abbott Schedules Roundtable Gun Talk At Texas Capitol
• Texas School Shooting: Here Are The Victims
• Dimitrios Pagourtzis: 5 Things About Accused School Shooter
• Texas Gun Control Group: 'Saddened And Outraged'

Sabika had traveled to America under the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program. Megan Lysaght, the program manager, announced Sabika’s death in a letter to participants.

“It is with great sadness in my heart that I need to inform you that one of our YES students, Sabika Sheikh of Pakistan, was killed today in the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas,” she wrote. “Please know that the YES program is devastated by this loss and we will remember Sabika and her [family] in our thoughts and prayers.”

David Hale, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said in a statement that “as an exchange student, Sabika was a youth ambassador, a bridge between our peoples and cultures. All of us at the U.S. mission in Pakistan are devastated by and mourn her loss.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent his condolences to Sabika’s family and friends in a written statement.

“Sabika was in the United States on the State Department-sponsored Youth Exchange and Study program, helping to build ties between the United States and her native Pakistan,” he wrote. “Sabika's death and that of the other victims is heartbreaking and will be mourned deeply both here in the United States, and in Pakistan.”

Photo: A petition is passed to call for changes to be made to keep gun violence out of schools at the Brand Lane Islamic Center following the funeral prayer service for Sabika Sheikh on May 20, 2018, in Stafford, Texas. Sheikh, an exchange student from Pakistan, was killed last Friday when 17-year-old fellow student Dimitrios Pagourtzis entered Santa Fe High School with a shotgun and a pistol and opened fire, killing her and 9 other people. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)