Fakhra Younus - Telegraph Born to a heroin-addicted mother on Napier Road in Karachi's red-light district, probably in 1978, Fakhra Younus was 18 and working as a "dancing girl" (a euphemism for a prostitute) when she met Bilil Khar, a former Member of the Provincial Assembly of Punjab and son of a former Punjab governor, Ghulam Mustafa Khar. The Khar family owns vast swathes of farmland in the province and is a major political force in Pakistan. A cousin of Bilal's is Pakistan's current Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. When he met Fakhra, Bilal Khar had already been married and divorced three times and was married at the time to a fourth wife with whom he had two children, facts of which Fakhra was unaware. After her release from hospital Fakhra Younus found that she had become a liability to her family, for whom she had once been a source of income. She and her son were subsequently taken in by Tehmina Durrani, a stepmother of Bilal's and a women's rights activist who had chronicled "the Khars" way of treating women" in her book My Feudal Lord, in which she described the abuse meted out to her by her ex-husband, Ghulam Mustafa Khar. In 2001, after some difficulty (the government, concerned about Pakistan's image abroad, dragged its heels over issuing a passport), Tehmina Durrani helped Fakhra to move to Rome where, over the next 11 years, she underwent 39 major operations. By the 38th operation, in 2011, she could move her mouth and one eye, and her face, though still badly disfigured, had regained some of its shape. By this time she had learned Italian and co-written a memoir, Il Volto Cancellato ("The Erased Face"), which brought in some income to add to a monthly disability allowance from the Italian government. But the operations exacted a heavy psychological toll, and she was said to be depressed by the impossibility of returning to Pakistan, where friends were worried that her life would be in danger. On March 17 Fakhra Younus climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in Rome and jumped. In a suicide note she gave her reason as "the silence of law on the atrocities and insensitivity of Pakistani rulers." News of her death arrived in Pakistan as the country was celebrating its first Oscar - awarded to the Karachi film-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for Saving Face, a documentary focusing on victims of acid attacks. As Fakhra's coffin arrived for burial, protesters were demanding that the case against Bilal Khar be reopened. But Khar continued to deny that he bore any responsibility for his wife's death: "My hands are clean," he told interviewers. Fakhra Younus is survived by her son, who is in the care of an Italian family. Fakhra Younus, born in 1978, died March 17 2012