KARACHI: Zulfiqar Ali can still vividly recall the day that he was summoned to a garbage skip near the Civil Hospital. A driver with the Edhi ambulance service with 14 years of experience, when he reached the spot, Ali was confronted with a heart-wrenching sight: the body of a newborn girl, bathed in blood and left to rot in the dump.

Cradling the baby’s corpse in his arms, Ali had the macabre duty of delivering the body to the welfare organisation, the only one that arranges proper burials of abandoned infant corpses.

As per routine practice, officials at the police station concerned would simply issue a handwritten slip, handing over custody of the corpse to Edhi for their last rites, instead of registering a criminal case.

But now, following a Dawn inquiry that laid bare a massive discrepancy between the number of officially reported cases of infanticide, and the number of bodies laid to rest by the Edhi Foundation, Sindh police has finally issued formal instructions to register a criminal case if a dead newborn is found abandoned.

Dawn inquiry prompts Sindh police to issue directive, making registration of criminal case mandatory whenever an infant’s body is found

In addition, officials across the province have been strictly asked to register FIRs of all such incidents and launch proper investigations to trace the motive and the characters behind such crimes.

According to data obtained from Edhi, in Karachi alone the organisation has laid to rest 576 infants over the past two-and-a-half years; 200 in the year 2021, 289 in 2022 and at least 87 in the first five months of the current year.

However, police records from the same period show that only four cases were officially registered in this period; one in 2021 and three this year.

This discrepancy stems from the fact that most police officials just don’t bother registering criminal cases when the abandoned body of an infant is found.

Sources say that since there is usually no one to foot the bill, no medical examination is carried out when such corpses are found and they are ‘informally’ handed over to welfare organisations for “safekeeping and burial” without fulfilling the requisite legal formalities.

According to Police Surgeon Dr Summaiya Syed, the only way to rule out foul play would be a proper medico-legal examination of each infant’s corpse. In the absence of an autopsy, she said, all these deaths would be considered criminal acts as there was no way of knowing whether or not the child was stillborn, or died of natural causes.

‘Informal’ arrangement

According to Zulfiqar Ali, the ambulance driver, whenever one of their staff comes across the body of an infant, they first inform the nearest police station, where an officer issues them with a handwritten letter, allowing them to bury the corpse.

Legal expert advocate Shoaib M. Ashraf told Dawn that the killing of a newborn should be treated as murder under Section 302 of the PPC.

In addition, sections 328 and 329 of the Pakistan Penal Code deal specifically with crimes related to infants.

Under Section 329 of the PPC, concealing or disposing of a child’s dead body or intentionally hiding or attempting to hide the birth, is a crime punishable by up to two years imprisonment, while the preceding section criminalises the abandonment of a child under the age of 12.

“It is not possible to proceed with a criminal investigation without undergoing medical procedures,” Mr Ashraf said. But according to Faisal Edhi, an overwhelming majority of such bodies do not reach the postmortem stage, nor is an FIR registered.

“If the police are informed and they fail to carry out legal procedures, that means the system has a problem,” observes Ms Syed, the police surgeon. She also questioned how Edhi staff could get permission to bury an infant without the issuance of a proper death certificate by the relevant authorities.

Dawn was able to obtain a sample of the letters that are issued by police to Edhi, providing them permission in writing “to bury an unidentified infant corpse”.

Faisal Edhi clarified that the letter is not a death certificate, and that it states the location where the body was found, and contains a request to Edhi staff to take care of its burial.

In June 2023, Dawn reached out to the office of the Sindh inspector general for comment on this ‘informal practice’, but did not receive an immediate response.

However, just over a month later, the IG’s office issued directives to all officers across the province, noting that “it has been observed that unidentified dead bodies of new born babies are being secretly disposed of by anonymous culprits mostly at street garbage sties or unattended routes/areas of districts of Sindh.”

The circular, seen by Dawn, pointed out that “often unclaimed dead bodies of new born babies are handed over to welfare organizations for their burial without carrying out inquest proceedings under 174 CrPC and registration of FIR. Such practice is illegal and against the mandatory norms and procedural conduct of police.”

The directives, issued by AIG (Operations) Haider Raza, orders all DIGs and SSPs of the district to initiate “an inquest proceeding under section 174 CrPC… followed by medical examination through concerned medico legal officer (MLO) and registration of FIR at concerned [police station] to trace the accused involved.”

When contacted, Sindh IG Ghulam Nabi Memon confirmed that the circular was issued on the basis of the inquiry put to him by Dawn, adding that in this month so far, three cases have been registered across Karachi over the recovery of newborn’s corpses.

New mechanism

The fight against infanticide was a pet project of Bilquis Edhi, who built the welfare organisation alongside her husband, the towering philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi.

It was she who introduced the ubiquitous ‘jhoolay’ (swinging cots) that are seen placed outside nearly every single Edhi property across the country.

Distressed by the rising rates of infanticide, Bilquis beseeched a nation to leave their ‘unwanted’ offspring in her care, rather than taking their lives.

The project had proved to be a massive success, with hundreds of abandoned children being raised in Edhi Homes, under the care of the Edhi matriarch. But in recent years, her son Faisal told Dawn, the Edhi Foundation has had to stop entertaining requests for adoption of abandoned newborns.

This, he said, was due to a scarcity of living children. “We were used to find around 20 abandoned infants in our cradle every month, but now the number has significantly dwindled to just one or two,” Faisal Edhi told Dawn.

But now, the fresh directives issued to police state that whenever the unclaimed dead body of a newborn baby is handed over to welfare organisations for burial and safe keeping, legal formalities must be adhered to.

After the fresh directions, Faisal Edhi’s son Saad told Dawn that they had received an intimation from the police, stating that medical examinations of unidentified bodies will be conducted and legal action will be taken, adding that the body will be handed over to them for burial afterwards.

When asked whether police had developed any mechanism to streamline this process, Saad Edhi hoped that in the coming days, a meeting could be arranged to come up with system for handling unidentified bodies of infants.

The circular issued by police also calls for sensitising welfare organisations regarding the proper procedures to be followed when such an incident comes to light.

“This would enable area police to collect and secure relevant material/evidence from the scene and process the case, as per law,” it said.

Imtiaz Ali also contributed to this report

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2023