Two-year-old Zahra had just started to speak fluently when her father Shuhaib Saquafi left for Madeena to perform Umrah (an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca) in the last week of March. Six days later, early on April 3, he got news of the death of his daughter from his home in Kadalundi of Kerala’s Kozhikode district. Zahra died along with her aunt Rahmath after they fell from the Alappuzha-Kannur Executive Express on board which an arson attack had caused panic on the night of Sunday, April 2. Police later identified the attacker as Shahrukh Saifi, a native of Noida.
A prayer ceremony was going on at Zahra’s house when TNM reached there on Tuesday. While the congregation chanted for Zahra’s soul, six-year-old Aysha, Zahra’s elder sister, was staring at the Imam. Her mother Jaseela did not come out of her room. Speaking to TNM, Shuhaib, who is also a religious preacher, said, “I enjoyed my daughter’s conversations for only a week before I left for Umrah. When I heard about the tragedy, I rushed back home and saw her for one last time.”
Around 8 pm on April 2, Zahra’s aunt Rahmath Manikoth took the little girl to the railway station to go on a visit to her grandmother’s home in Mattannur, Kannur. “It had been a while since her grandmother expressed a wish to meet Zahra. My wife was attending a 19-day training (Zahrathul Quran, an Islamic preschool) as she is a teacher at Markaz Public School. So my wife’s elder sister Rahmath came to pick up Zahra,” Shuhaib said.
Shuhaib, Zahra's father
He recalled that they had been planning to take Zahra to Mattannur for a while. “Finally, it happened on that dreadful day. She was very happy to be going on a journey. Moreover, she loved staying at Mattannur and considered her aunt also as her mother. At least my daughter is not alone, she went with her favourite person,” he said. April 6 is Zahra’s maternal grandfather Abdul Rahman’s seventh death anniversary, which was why Rahmath had decided to take Zahra to Mattannur in the week before that.
Rahmath, Zahra, and Raziq, a neighbour who accompanied them, boarded the train around 8.50 pm from Feroke railway station. The planned arson attack happened about 30 minutes later, when the train was near the Elathur railway station. According to the police, when the attacker sprayed inflammable liquid in the D1 coach of the train, everyone ran amok. In the ensuing panic, Rahmath, Zahra, and a third passenger identified as Noufeeq are believed to have jumped or slipped from the running train. As per the preliminary analysis of the postmortem, the three died due to injuries to the head.
“We (religious preachers) are not supposed to grieve, we need to console others. But there are times when we are grief-stricken too. We are still trying to cope with our loss. I was more worried about Jaseela, but she has come to terms with it through spiritual ways,” Shuhaib added.