Number 774. One year to the day Aqsa Parvez was stolen from this world -- allegedly by two members of her family -- that is all there is at her gravesite to show she even existed.
Section 17, plot number 774, in the Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton, to be precise. No name, no date of birth, no date of death. No nothing.
But resting here is a girl who dared to be Canadian.
She was strangled Dec. 10, 2007 inside her family's Longhorn Trail home.
Her father and brother will be in court next week to answer to charges of first-degree murder.
At Parvez' gravesite, one would never know the 16-year-old Grade 11 Applewood Heights Secondary School student was buried here. You would never know anybody was buried here.
"If not for a couple of her girlfriends, who put some flowers there, there would be nothing," said a disgusted Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and author of Chasing a Mirage, The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State. "It's disgraceful."
"That girl was not a number," adds Imam Syed Soharwardy, of the Al-Mamadinah Islamic Centre in Calgary and national president of Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. "She had a name and a life. It makes me sick."
More at:
http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/joe_warmington/2008/12/10/7692161-sun.html