FARKHUNDA, A 27 YEAR OLD AFGHAN WOMAN ASPIRING TO BE A TEACHER, WAS FALSELY ACCUSED OF BURNING THE QURAN. SHE WAS BRUTALLY ATTACKED WITH STONES AND STICKS, DRAGGED , THROWN FROM A ROOF, RUN OVER BY A CAR, AND BURNED TO DEATH WITH GASOLINE.

 Farkhunda, a 27-year-old Afghan woman aspiring to be a teacher, was falsely accused of burning the Quran. She was brutally attacked with stones and sticks, dragged, thrown from a roof, run over by a car, and burned to death with gasoline.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan —  

Last year, on the eve of the Persian New Year, amateur cellphone video captured by hundreds of mostly young men showed a crowd beating a young woman, her face covered in blood. She pleaded for her life and denied their accusation — that she had burned pages from the Koran.

After she was dead, they dragged her body from the back of a Toyota hatchback, dumped the corpse in a dry patch of the Kabul River and set it afire.

The gruesome video circulated online and soon was everywhere. The desperate cries of Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old student of Islamic studies, echoed in news broadcasts as Afghan commentators and politicians debated how such an act could have taken place in one of the Afghan capital’s most trafficked areas.

Within 24 hours after the killing on March 19, 2015, security officials and the Afghan religious affairs ministry declared there was no evidence proving Malikzada had burned pages of the Koran as the crowd at the Shah-Do Shamshira shrine had claimed.

One year after the killing, many Afghans continue to wonder how a crowd of hundreds stood by and recorded Malikzada’s nearly two-hour-long ordeal without trying to intervene.

 In recent days Afghans staged events to remember the violence, including a group of artists who staged a re-creation of her death.

For Shakeela Ebrahimkhel, a television journalist who joined a group of women who carried Malikzada’s coffin to her final resting place, the killing highlighted that even in the nation’s urban centers, old attitudes pervade.