Perhaps a yahoo beat up an adult named Osama. Maybe school kids bullied a young Muslim. Maybe, I thought uneasily, something worse had happened -- like the murder of a Sikh in Arizona, soon after Sept. 11, apparently because his killer mistook him for a Muslim. "I stand for America," the murderer barked as police led him away. Such cases may be isolated, duly handled by authorities. But there's nothing implausible about Americans acting on their hatreds.

So I opened my laptop in the Islamabad hotel and typed. "Osama - murder - Houston, Texas."

I blinked with surprise. The story popped up instantly. Just as Shireen told me, a Pakistani boy named Osama Nasir, 6 years old, was murdered at his home in January 2002. His father, Mohammad Nasir, was found in the house with his throat slit. The mother was in another city. Another story followed, shorter: Mohammad Nasir was a suspect. One final article appeared, very brief indeed: Police had charged Mohammad Nasir with the murder of his son Osama. Trial pending.

"That's impossible," Shireen told me when I reported what I'd found. We were at a cocktail party in a house with a silk carpet on the wall. Did I really think the police had told the truth?

"Well, yes. I know the reporter who wrote about it and ..."

"What parent," Shireen cut me off, "would kill his son?"

I had to smile. Actually, I said, that happens not infrequently in my country. Houston, in fact, recently tried a notorious case of this kind. The parent's name was Andrea Yates.

"Well, a Pakistani parent couldn't do it," Shireen said flatly. And the conversation ended. Her gaze drifted toward the middle distance, as if I'd proved an uncomfortably dull party guest.

But somehow my own thoughts, instead of drifting elsewhere, kept returning to Shireen's account. Why did I care so much about it? I went home, wrote other pieces about Pakistan, yet couldn't shake this slight tale from my mind. I repeated it at dinners or over margaritas, trying to find out why it stayed with me. One friend said it proved that xenophobia is borderless. Another thought it showed the irrationality of America's critics. A third just found it sad.

What about the political implications, suggested Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Muslim studies at American University, when I called to ask him his opinion.

"Tell me," Akbar, a Pakistani, said. "How did professor Mazari react to what you told her?"

"She didn't, really," I said.

"You'll never win that discussion," he replied. "We are seeing the worst trend among Muslim intellectuals right now: a self-inflicted blindness. Xenophobia, paranoia and half-truths are passing for reality. There are many examples in Pakistan where fathers kill girls for the most minor of reasons," he added. "How can they say this happens only in the United States?"

Houston Police Officer Muzaffar Siddiqi, who translated into Urdu at the crime scene, agreed. On the day of the murder, he told me, police had already investigated two 911 calls from the Nasir house, and found the doors all locked. When they answered a third call, they found the door ajar, and 6-year-old Osama dead on his bed. Someone had stabbed him, slashed his throat repeatedly, then laid him on his Pokémon bedsheets.

Osama's father, Mohammad Nasir, was bleeding from a slit throat.

The murder occurred outside Officer Siddiqi's jurisdiction, but as Houston's liaison for Asian and Middle Eastern residents, he came to the scene to help. Siddiqi has served for a decade on Houston's police force, and recently was named Officer of the Year. Before he moved to Houston, though, he was a policeman in Karachi, Pakistan. And contrary to Shireen's claim, Siddiqi said, there is a great deal of family violence there, including parental homicide. Yet in eight years, he didn't conduct one domestic violence investigation.

"The thing is," he said, "over there, women are not independent ... A lot of times the husband will be abusive, but the wife won't complain because women think: What happens if I complain? He will divorce me, I'll have to go back to my dad and mom, and people will make fun of my parents."

Siddiqi did testify repeatedly in one kind of domestic homicide in Pakistan. "It's financial -- not because they've gone crazy," he explained. They all involved a rural father, despairing over a failed crop or overwhelming debt, who killed his entire family and then himself.

Maybe young Osama's death was not so different. We'll never know, because although the trial took place in January 2003, the narrative was never clear -- even to the prosecution.

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