The rape and murder of eight-year-old Zainab a week ago in Pakistan’s Kasur has left a nation shocked and angry. Amid protests on the streets and on social media, a Pakistani anchor has touched hearts with an unusual gesture.

Last evening, Kiran Naz of Pakistan’s Samaa TV presented the news with her little daughter sitting on her lap, conveying a parent’s grief, reports the NDTV.

‘Today I am not Kiran Naz. Today I am a mother. That’s why I am sitting with my daughter,’ Ms Naz said in her brief introduction before the channel’s 7pm news bulletin on Wednesday.

The anchor went on to share her outrage over Zainab’s tragedy, mostly her sheer frustration as a parent that there had been no progress in tracking down the killer.

Not often that you see a TV news anchor bring her own child to her news cast - @SAMAATV 's Kiran Naz did precisely that to make a point about how she felt as a mother in Pakistan #JusticeForZainab #Justice4Zainab pic.twitter.com/6XMXQJmfzV

— omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) January 10, 2018

‘I have nothing else to talk about today, except Zainab,’ she said at the end of a nearly two-minute-long clip.

‘It is true that a child’s corpse is the heaviest. Today Pakistan is buried beneath the burden of the little one’s janaza (funeral)...’ Ms Naz said, choking up.

Zainab was kidnapped on January 4. Five days later, her body was found in a garbage pile, a Pakistani police official told AFP. The girl’s parents, who had been in Saudi Arabia, flew back to Pakistan on Wednesday and told reporters in Islamabad they would not bury their daughter until her killer was arrested.

The man who killed her is still roaming free, which provoked deadly riots in Kasur, in which two protesters were killed.

On social media, people are using the hashtag #JusticeforZainab to express their anger.