ASP Syeda Shehrbano Naqvi, who saved a woman from a mob in Lahore’s Ichhra Bazaar last week, has hoped that the incident would be the last of its type, “at least in Pakistan”.

“The most important thing is that it has made the society question itself,” she said in an interview with Yalda Hakim of Sky News aired on Monday.

Sherbano spoke about the incident where she controlled the mob and took the woman from the restaurant to the police vehicle.

The Lahore police officer, described as a hero, took the woman from the restaurant to the police vehicle while being surrounded by a charged mob. In some videos, people can be heard chanting that those who commit blasphemy should be beheaded as she took away the girl.

In videos that went viral on social media, the woman looked scared, sitting in the far corner of the restaurant, and shielding her face with her hand as others made accusations against her.

It was a four or five-minute walk from the main road to the bustling bazaar, according to Sherhrbano and added that incident took place when the bazaar was full of customers in multiple shops and people were going on with their daily activities all the while knowing there was a woman surrounded by around 200 people ready to be lynched.

“That’s the question that is going to be posed on the society’s consciousness, on its conduct and how it has degenerated and why it has degenerated to such an extent. Now people have started asking: ‘If 200 people can be ready to lynch her, why can’t 600 be ready to protect her?’”

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In her interview with BBC Urdu, she said that the distance from the shop to the police vehicle was small but “mentally too long”.

She admitted that the situation could have escalated and her own life was in danger.

Last month, Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir on Wednesday lauded ASP Shehrbano for her “selfless devotion to duty and professionalism in diffusing a volatile situation”.

“Our lives, when we’re in such a situation, they become pretty secondary and not so important, because the life of the victim is at stake, the image of the country is at stake.”