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Hundreds of men watched her die. Many of them filmed it on their phones instead of stopping it.Farkhunda Malikzada was 27 years old, a religious studies student in Kabul, Afghanistan. On March 19, 2015, she got into an argument with a street vendor outside a shrine. He was selling amulets to women, charms he claimed would bring luck or protection. Farkhunda told him it was un-Islamic, a scam dressed up as religion.He couldn't win that argument honestly. So he changed the subject entirely. He accused her of burning a copy of the Quran.It wasn't true. Police investigations later confirmed she never touched a Quran that day. But the accusation didn't need to be true. It only needed to be said out loud near a mosque full of men already primed to believe the worst.Word spread instantly. A crowd gathered, then grew into a mob. Police actually managed to get Farkhunda onto the roof of a nearby shed, briefly out of reach. But the men below started throwing poles and planks of wood at her until she lost her grip and fell back into the crowd.What happened next was filmed, repeatedly, by the same men doing it. She was beaten with sticks and stones. Her hijab was torn off. She was thrown from a height, run over by a car, dragged for nearly 100 meters, and then, while still alive or already dead, her body was set on fire and dumped near the Kabul River. The mob shouted religious chants throughout, including after they were certain she was dead.Hundreds of people stood and watched. Several police officers were among them. Almost nobody intervened.The footage went viral before Farkhunda's own family had fully processed what happened to her. Afghanistan, and then the world, watched a woman get murdered in broad daylight over an accusation that was never true, and that the mob never once tried to verify before killing her.What came after exposed something almost as disturbing as the murder itself. Forty-nine people were eventually arrested. Four men were initially sentenced to death. But on appeal, those death sentences were quietly overturned and reduced. The man who first shouted the false accusation, the shrine's own custodian, had his death sentence commuted down to 20 years. Investigators believed a local fortune-teller helped set the whole mob attack in motion. He was found not guilty on appeal and walked free.Farkhunda's own funeral became an act of defiance. Afghan tradition holds that only men carry a coffin. Her funeral was carried by women, publicly, breaking that tradition in front of the same society that had just watched hundreds of men kill her and call it righteous.A monument now stands where she died. Afghan women still visit it. Her brother, after the family fled the country entirely, asked the only question that was ever going to matter: where is the justice.Farkhunda didn't burn a Quran. She burned instead, because one man's ego and a mosque full of men who never asked a single question decided her life was worth less than his lie.Sources: Wikipedia"Murder of Farkhunda Malikzada"; The New York Times (via The Irish Times), "Flawed justice after mob killing of Farkhunda in Afghanistan"; Equal Times, "One year after the lynching of Farkhunda, has anything changed for Afghan women?"