STAFFORD, Texas: A host family member of Sabika Sheikh wipes away a tear while speaking at her funeral prayer service at the Brand Lane Islamic Center on Sunday. - AFP

STAFFORD, Texas: Houston’s Muslim community gathered to offer prayers Sunday at the funeral service for a 17-year-old Pakistani exchange student killed in a mass shooting at her southeast Texas high school. About 1,000 people, many with Pakistani roots and wearing traditional Muslim dress, converged on an Islamic center in Stafford to honor Sabika Sheikh, whose body was brought by hearse to the somber service from Santa Fe, the nearby small rural town where a student murdered 10 people including eight students.

Among the mourners was the late teen’s first cousin who lives in the United States. She said Sheikh’s relatives are completely devastated. “The family back home, we are in touch with them. They’re crying every moment. Her mother is in denial right now,” Shaheera Al-Basid, a graduate student in the US capital Washington, said at the funeral service. “It’s a shock we need our entire life to recover from,” the 26-year-old added.

Men lined up in rows offered traditional mourning prayers as Sheikh’s coffin, draped in the green and white flag of Pakistan, was brought into a small, cramped sanctuary. Sheikh had been due to return home in mere weeks, in time for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

‘Shock’

“It’s a shock, it’s so sad,” said realtor Ike Samad, 67, who was born in Pakistan but has lived here most of his adult life and raised his children as Americans. “I came here just like her, as a student,” he recalled. “God forbid that could have happened to me when I was here. As a parent, it is just devastating.” Samad also addressed the painful irony that a young woman from a country that many Americans associated with the war on terror in the aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington was killed in a country that millions around the world see as a bastion of freedom. The attacks were a “tragedy, and tragedy sometimes teaches you life,” he said. “But it also revisits, and in this case very close to here.”

Several Pakistani-American youths also attended the funeral service, including Danyal Zakaria of nearby Sugar Land, Texas. The 17-year-old said it was “truly mind-blowing” that an exchange student his age could be cut down in cold blood at a US school. “This nation is known to be safe,” he said. “If America is not safe, then where is?”

Gun control

Meanwhile, Sheikh’s father said yesterday he hoped that the death of his daughter, who wanted to serve her country as a civil servant or diplomat, would help spur gun control in the United States. Santa Fe High School, southeast of Houston, on Friday joined a grim list of US schools and campuses where students and staff have been gunned down, stoking a divisive US debate about gun laws. “Sabika’s case should become an example to change the gun laws,” her father, Aziz Sheikh told Reuters, speaking by telephone from the family home in the city of Karachi.

Most Pakistani youngsters dream of studying abroad, with the United States the favorite destination for many. Aziz Sheikh said the danger of a school shooting had not crossed his mind when he sent Sabika to study in the United States for a year. Now he wants her death to help spur change. “It has become so common,” he said of school shootings. “I want this to become a base on which the people over there can stand and pass a law to deal with this. I’ll do whatever I can,” he said.

Students said the teenaged boy charged with fatally shooting 10 people, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, opened fire in an art class shortly before 8 am on Friday. Sabika was part of the YES exchange program funded by the US State Department, which provides scholarships for students from countries with significant Muslim populations to spend an academic year in the United States. Sabika loved her time in Texas, Sheikh said. “She appreciated it so much. She was so excited to be there and to study and meet the people, especially the teachers,” he said.

Her family spoke to her every day and she had been due to return to Pakistan on June 9, at the end of the school year. US secretary of state Mike Pompeo offered his condolences in a statement on Saturday, saying Sabika was “helping to build ties between the United States and her native Pakistan”. Her father said Sabika had wanted to work in government in some capacity, to help her country. “She would say she wanted to join the foreign office or the civil service,” her father said. “The reason was that she said was there is a lot of talent in Pakistan but the image and perception of the country was really bad, and she wanted to clear that up.” The US ambassador to Pakistan, David Hale, visited the family in Karachi to offer condolences, the US embassy said in a statement. - Agencies