All it took was two weeks for the sisters, 12-year-old Sukaina* and six-year-old Salma*, to return home. They were kidnapped, sold to a buyer, and were ready to be shifted to a new location from their safe house before the police recovered them in a raid. Had their saviours been two hours late, the girls would have been lost in the web of child trafficking.

“They play indoors now,” says Saleem*, their 16-year-old elder brother. “They are too scared to step outside.”

The sisters were not kidnapped for ransom — after all, how much ransom can a rickshaw driver possibly afford?

Sukaina and Salma were in fact victims of an organised crime racket in Karachi, which kidnaps children and trades them for profit. Victims mostly belong to low and middle-income households, thereby precluding the possibility of the abductors receiving handsome sums in ransom.

“There are over 2,200 children missing in Karachi this year,” claims Muhammad Ali, president of Roshni Helpline 1138, a local NGO that operates as a 24/7 child complaint and response centre. “Of the cases reported to us, 26 kids are still missing while we managed to recover 48.”

What the abductors are after are the children themselves; to be used and abused in a number of criminal offenses. Many victims are trafficked, both within the country and internationally, while in some cases, one child can be subject to multiple crimes simultaneously.

“These gangs kidnap children for various purposes,” explains Hussain Asghar, deputy director-general of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). “The first is of course pushing them into beggary. Another is to raise them to work in mines and brick kilns.

“Then there is the matter of small kids being abducted for illegal adoptions — we suspect a couple of NGOs are involved in this. Children are also kidnapped for organ trade.

“Last and perhaps the gravest, these kids are kidnapped for sexual crimes such as rape and sodomy — of both girls and boys. These kids are abused, their sexual assault is filmed, and sold as child pornography.”

Lubna Tiwana, FIA’s assistant director for international departures at the Jinnah International Airport, agrees with the broad description of crimes committed against missing children. She points to Malta as a destination of kidnapped-for-adoption children.

“In Malta, there is great demand for babies or young children for adoption purposes. They want kids who are fair and well-fed. Therefore, the children kidnapped for this purpose are from upper and middle-class homes. Usually, there is direct selling to the client in such cases,” claims Tiwana.

She contends that there is no longer any incidence of children being trafficked to the United Arab Emirates for camel jockeying purposes, after the FIA cracked down on the practice in 2001-2002, incidentally after a case was registered in the Gulistan-i-Jauhar Police Station.

During the course of investigations for this story as well as conversations with senior police and FIA officials, it emerged that some gangs operating on a local scale are based in four cities: Hyderabad, Jamshoro, Rahim Yar Khan and Quetta. There are likely to be other locations where such gangs exist, but during the course of this story, the mention of these four cities popped up again and again — from both the victims’ end and that of law enforcement.

Over 2,200 children are reported to be missing in Karachi this year. Some fear they are being trafficked, others believe they are being sexually abused and/or sold within the city

“We recovered a child from Peerabad,” narrates SSP District West Azfar Mehshar, “who had managed to escape the custody of a gang. This child’s father had passed away and the mother had remarried. But the new father kicked this child out of his home, and as a result, he had become a street child who lived in the Saddar Cantonment area.”

The disclosures made by the child informed the police of the gang’s modus operandi.

“This gang would sell children on monthly contracts — one month, three months, six months — and they were to be used for different purposes. What we discovered was that these were established networks, from Karachi to Quetta, who had a large market to sell to,” says Mehshar.

“Any child that was to be their target was scouted beforehand — there were separate teams assigned just for this task. Another team would arrange for their transportation and buy tickets for them. Usually, these kids are transported in groups of 8-10. They are attached with some truck driver, who also rapes them en route. Then there was an imposter police officer to help them; we later discovered this criminal was close to a serving police officer, and would use his car and staff,” explains the SSP.

“There is another category of children who are used by such gangs: those who want to earn an honest living, but who aren’t able to. Again, these kids are scouted before hand, and on the promise of food, shelter and clothing, brought into the fold,” says the officer.

“Gangs charge between Rs30,000 and Rs 50,000 from the parties they sell these children to, and again, their purpose is sexual exploitation. There is a bustling market for the trade of children’s bodies. In Karachi, this market exists in suburban areas, while you’ll also witness a heavy demand for children’s bodies in Balochistan,” explains Mehshar.

“Any child that was to be their target was scouted beforehand — there were separate teams assigned just for this task. Another team would arrange for their transportation and buy tickets for them. Usually, these kids are transported in groups of 8-10.

The gang — a three-member team — was eventually busted from Frontier Colony, Manghopir. Another three children were recovered from their custody. The suspects confessed to selling kids for many years to a buyer in Quetta.

Some of the larger gangs that exist in Sindh kidnap for all kinds of purposes, sometimes even outsourcing some tasks to smaller groups — such as transporting a kidnapped child back to Karachi, and handing a child over to beggars’ groups and receiving cash in return.

Tiwana sees collusion between truckers plying the highways, rest-houses on the highway, and these gangs for the transport of these children. “En route, it is these places that allow truckers to stay with these children without inquiring whose kids are these. Nor do they inform law enforcement,” she says.

“But you have to be careful,” warns FIA’s Asghar. “You cannot categorise one or another criminal practice as a trend, because these gangs are very enterprising and their modus operandi changes very rapidly too. The nature of their crime is very sophisticated, and there are layers upon layers of complexity and anonymity in this crime.”

And yet, there are revelations from victims and victims’ families that can help join the dots.

In the abduction case of Abdullah*, a deaf child, police sources conjecture that it could have been a gang from either Hyderabad or Jamshoro who were responsible for kidnapping him.

“It was through his gestures that we discovered that he had been kept in a forest, that there was knee-deep water where he was kept, and that his abductors wanted to amputate his arms,” narrates Waqar Alam*, Abdullah’s father and a rickshaw driver by profession. “There were puncture marks on the soles of his feet, as if he had been walking on thorns. I still don’t know when he returned to the city, how, or who fed him during this time.”

Their wait to recover their child was two months; Alam frequently visited Hyderabad during this time, since he had received information that his son had been spotted there.

But eventually, Abdullah was recovered near Karachi’s Old Sabzi Mandi.

Although the gang that nabbed Abdullah was neither identified by the police nor could any action be taken against them, the theory offered by one police source is that his spotting in Hyderabad and subsequent recovery in Karachi means that the distance that this child had to make to return home isn’t too great. The conjecture, therefore, is that a gang from either Hyderabad or Jamshoro could have kidnapped him.

“What we also know is that many times, the children’s guise and inflections are completely altered before they are sent out to beg; even their parents can’t recognise them in that state.

“What we do know is that some of these gangs are based away from Karachi, but their supply line and demand is based in Karachi,” explains the police source. “What we also know is that many times, the children’s guise and inflections are completely altered before they are sent out to beg; even their parents can’t recognise them in that state.”

Naseer Khan* is one such teenaged victim. A Pakhtun by birth, Khan used to be tall, slim and fair. When his parents and the police recovered him, even his mother was taken aback at her son’s new guise. Gone were his fair complexion, trimmed locks and his upright style of walking; he was now tanned to the extreme, had no hair, slouched as he walked, and spoke in a Makrani accent.

“Khan’s abductors had actually kept him in the Manghopir area. He was lodged in a stable along with horses and cattle; what the abductors wanted to do was to change his inflection to that of horses, which they managed to do very successfully. Then they had his ear pierced and also drew tattoos across his body. He was unrecognisable when we recovered him,” explains Roshni’s Ali.

Such changes to children’s bodies and appearances are common among gangs who push children into beggary.

“These gangs never operate directly; they always have a middleman to do their bidding. This gives the gang plausible deniability,” argues the police source. “Whether it’s a Rahim Yar Khan gang or one from Quetta or Hyderabad, their modus operandi is pretty similar in this regard.”

Indeed, as was the case with the sisters Sukaina and Salma, a rickshaw driver was nabbed as the middleman of the kidnappers. This man had picked the girls up from the park where they were playing, drove them around the city, and had lodged them in his house. Police managed to track him down through his cell phone number, and on his pinpointing, recovered the sisters.

“In Malta, there is great demand for babies or young children for adoption purposes. They want kids who are fair and well-fed. Therefore, the children kidnapped for this purpose are from upper and middle-class homes.

But while the rickshaw driver could be considered a co-accused in the case, the actual culprits evaded arrest. With the girls safely home and their parents unwilling to pursue the case any further, there is no pressure on the police to bust the child kidnappers’ gang either.

“In some cases, you cannot imagine the pressure exerted on the FIA and police to botch the case somehow and release the suspects,” says FIA’s Tiwana. “We raided a house in Defence in search of a missing child. The abductors had managed to move the child before we could catch them, so we brought in a few women present at the scene for questioning. But before we had even returned to the station, we had received calls from multiple influential quarters to let those women go. We ultimately had to release them.”

On a pavement near Gulshan Chowrangi, three-foot-tall Fiza* walks with her younger brother Faran* in tow. She doesn’t know her age or that of her brother’s. Her job is to beg and wait for a rickshaw driver to pick them up and drop them ‘home.’

“I have to protect him,” says Fiza. “People aren’t nice without a reason.”

Indeed, this conversation was only sparked after I made good on the offer of a free meal for the two, sitting out in the open, and across a table.

“We are from Multan,” she says. “My father used to repair motorbikes.”

The siblings were walking home from their madressah in the afternoon, when a man told them their father was in the hospital and he had to take them there. Fiza had never seen this man before, but he described her father perfectly. “He said my uncle has already taken my mother to the hospital, and we didn’t need to go home.”

The details of what she remembers next are hazy and incomplete — a warehouse with wooden walls, many children, noise of cattle, children being slapped about by four men— but what she shows is a mark of some sort that was tattooed just above her hip.

They were moved from their first location in threes and fours, but along with some of the other kidnapped children, they landed in Karachi on a public bus. From thereon, it was a life of beggary.

“A rickshaw driver drops us here around 8am, and then we beg till late at night. We have to go and stand in that corner by the fruit-seller once the shops start closing. A rickshaw driver picks us up from that spot and takes us home.”

“These gangs never operate directly; they always have a middleman to do their bidding. This gives the gang plausible deniability,” argues the police source. “Whether it’s a Rahim Yar Khan gang or one from Quetta or Hyderabad, their modus operandi is pretty similar in this regard.

Fiza can’t describe the address, but says their new home is surrounded by mountains. “If you don’t bring money back every night, then they humiliate and beat you up,” she says of her current handlers. “Sometimes, they make you do things to them.”

Has she ever thought about complaining to the police?

“I can’t trust the police,” is Fiza’s assertive response. “It was our first few days working this area, when a cop threatened to take away Faizan unless I did as he said. There were two, on a motorbike. One stood watch and held Faizan. The other played with my body. It all happened under that tree on the other side of the road. Sometimes I do the same thing for people inside cars; then I hide the money. I do this for us, I want to save and take a bus back home.”

Dangerous delays

“Forty-eight hours. It is only after 48 hours that an FIR can be registered for a kid having gone missing,” explains Muhammad Ali, president of Roshni Helpline 1138, a local NGO that operates as a 24/7 child complaint and response centre. “But it is also those 48 hours that are most crucial for a child; if you miss this timeframe, you can lose the child and most often do.”

Mohammed Saqib* lost his three-year-old daughter that way. “The police officer on duty filled out a kutchi report, and told us to go looking for her ourselves. He kept saying come back tomorrow and report your progress to me. An FIR was finally lodged on the fifth day, but we haven’t been able to trace her. We don’t even know if she is alive nor does the police.”

“The loss of contact with parents defines if a child has gone missing,” argues Ali. “As soon as parents lose contact with their children, we must consider that child to be missing, no ifs and buts about it.”

On the other hand, a senior police official, talking on condition of anonymity, argued that procedurally, there is no time bar in cases of children going missing. “In the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) schedule of offences, kidnapping of a child or an adult is a cognisable offence. Sometimes officers need time to find clarity on the issue; a lost child is not necessarily a kidnapped child,” he says. “Sometimes, FIRs are registered the first day.”

Sindh’s 48-hour time restriction on a missing child being considered “missing” is in fact a betterment of sorts — not too long ago, the struggle of child rights activists was geared around having children going missing recognised as a cognisable offence. The time restriction bound came as an interim order issued by the court of Justice Maqbool Baqar, former chief justice of the Sindh High Court.

“Just before he was elevated to the Supreme Court and had to leave for Islamabad, Justice Baqar issued an interim order in one of our petitions, whereby the police were forced to consider cases of missing children as a cognisable offence after 48 hours. There is no implementation, but in theory at least, the law says 48 hours,” describes Ali.

When an offence is “cognisable,” it allows a police officer to make arrests or start investigations without any court orders. As per the current law, for the first 48 hours of a child going missing, the police cannot act on the assumption of a child actually being missing.

“What is known as a kutchi report is in fact a register of non-cognisable offences. NC reports, as they are known in police parlance, are written in the roznamcha (daily diary) and are registered under section 155 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPc),” explains Ali.

Action can only be taken on NC reports if a registered magistrate orders the police to do so, but till then, it is largely a testing wait for the parents. What the police can initiate during the first 48 hours is intimating all stations of a possible case of a missing child, and transmitting data such as personal and appearance details. Whether it happens as stipulated in the law is a different matter.

“When you have a medico-legal examination conducted, you are told that the child has been raped repeatedly. But when it comes to testimony, those accused go scot-free since the law gives the benefit of doubt to the criminal.

“FIRs meanwhile are registered under section 154 of the CrPC, when the offence is officially declared cognisable. It is only after an FIR is registered that an investigation can begin in earnest, when an investigation officer is assigned to a case and he begins his search. In this process of turning a kutchi report into an FIR, we lose 48 very precious hours. This delay is fatal for many,” he argues.

But there is another catch: who will believe a child?

“Once we recover a child, we do ask them what happened and how. But a child is a minor, and as such, his or her statement is not admissible in the eyes of the law. Many sections of our law are imperfect and inadequate,” argues SSP District West Azfar Mehshar, who is trained in matters of juvenile rights and protection.

“When you have a medico-legal examination conducted, you are told that the child has been raped repeatedly. But when it comes to testimony, those accused go scot-free since the law gives the benefit of doubt to the criminal,” says Mehshar.

At the level of the police station, cases are largely handled with the same broad brush that delays the registration of an FIR. In part, the reason for this delay is the victims’ class background: without any power or influence to wield over the police, most victims’ parents are at the mercy of the officer on duty to register a complaint or an FIR.

“Over the past year-and-a-half, a number of children’s bodies have been recovered in the jurisdiction of the Mobina Town Police Station, for example. All instances have been reported in the media,” explains Ali. “Had the FIRs been registered in time, we could have saved at least half these kids. Even after their deaths, we don’t have acknowledgement of the fact that this is an emerging trend, and whoever is behind it needs to be caught.”

For the Roshni Helpline chief, the issue begins at the framing of the problem: “Whether its kidnapping of children, trafficking or any other crime, it all starts at the point when a child goes missing. What happens thereafter are various manifestations of the problem of missing children.”

The implications of this argument are wide-ranging: currently, children’s abductions fall under the larger category of ‘kidnappings’ — cases under this head are to be investigated by the police. But if law enforcement suspects the child to have been trafficked, the case is transferred to the FIA. As such, there is no specialised branch of law enforcement dealing with crimes against children.

“Local police do not want to take jurisdiction of such cases,” explains senior lawyer Omer Sial, who echoes the view that FIRs for missing children’s cases can be registered as kidnapping cases without delay.

“Local police do not want to take jurisdiction of such cases. The shuttle between the police and FIA to determine if the case is of an individual nature or if it is part of a group or a larger arrangement can cause much delay.

“The shuttle between the police and FIA to determine if the case is of an individual nature or if it is part of a group or a larger arrangement can cause much delay. If it’s an individual’s case, the police need to take jurisdiction. When it comes to groups, it becomes the FIA’s jurisdiction,” argues Sial, adding that the FIA can only come to action after the registration of an FIR. “Unless you know someone in law enforcement or have strings to pull, the system works very slowly. It all boils down to the registration of an FIR.”

When an FIR is formally registered, an investigation officer is assigned to the case — at least in theory. But do the police have a budget for comprehensive investigations into missing children’s cases?

In July 2015, Sindh Finance Secretary Sohail Rajput had appeared before the Supreme Court’s Karachi registry in a case pertaining to withholding and redistribution of funds meant for investigation by IGP Ghulam Haider Jamali. The case is being heard by a three-member bench headed by Justice Amir Hani Muslim, with Justice Sarmad Jalal Osmani and Justice Gulzar Ahmed as the other two members.

Rajput had told the court that the police had requisitioned Rs316 million for its investigation wing, but the provincial government had allocated only Rs140 million. Finding discrepancies in the details furnished by the finance secretary, the court had ordered him to re-submit his report with amounts transferred from the finance department to the police.

Simultaneously, the court had ordered the police chief to explain his criteria of distributing funds under the “costs of investigation” head. He was also asked for the number of criminal cases being investigated in different districts of Sindh, excluding Karachi, the amounts disbursed to them, and the date when funds were moved.

But a month later, the court was left dissatisfied with the ambiguous responses furnished by the police and the government. A committee was constituted thereafter, comprising the Sindh chief secretary, advocate-general, IGP and Finance and Home secretaries, to provide a comprehensive review and audit report of investigation funds.

“The irony was that while the Supreme Court registry was in session, an investigation officer in a missing children’s case was asking an aggrieved father for money to meet investigation costs, including travel,” claims Ali. “But it was also this case that was solved at the earliest, since senior police officials had resolved to get results as soon as possible.”

But while an officer or two can take up a case out of interest, is the system working to protect children and recover them in case they went missing?

Senior journalist Hasan Mansoor frames the discussion in terms of camouflaged numbers — by considering missing children as either ‘kidnapped’ or ‘trafficked’, the incidence of missing children gets camouflaged in adult crime statistics.

“Nobody — including the police, welfare and home departments, or even non-governmental organisations — has exact or close-to-actual data about missing children in Sindh. Most NGOs rely on newspaper reports to compile their data, which is only a tiny portion of the actual incidence,” says Mansoor.

“Most parents and relatives do not report their children having gone missing either, and those that do get trapped in the FIR registration process. Because missing children is a non-cognisable offence, no police official or provincial authority takes the matter seriously,” he says.

“Once their child is recovered, parents usually want to move on and not pursue the case any further,” says Ali. “Nobody wants another ordeal at hand, having just escaped one. In fact, parents even disregard our advice of trauma counselling for the child and themselves; they usually bid farewell and only return if they are in trouble again.”

Many tasks described by various stake holders are in fact those of the Sindh government — providing focus on the problem and integrating the response of law enforcement and health professionals.

In May 2011, the provincial assembly had passed the Sindh Child Protection Authority Act, which dictated the formation of a provincial child protection authority within 90 days. Four years later, with two ministers having overseen the matter and left their portfolios, the matter is still in cold storage.

“Whenever we recover children, there is always a stark realisation that we don’t have any place in Sindh where we can provide these kids with food and shelter, even temporary. These children are under immense stress, more than you and I can fathom. But we don’t have an authority which can take charge of the situation and rehabilitate these kids,” says SSP Mehshar.

“We need to change the law, perhaps introduce a special ordinance for the purpose. We need to make well-defined criteria of who is classified as a missing child, a runaway etc. And perhaps, assign focal persons in each district for child protection cells in police stations. These cells can quickly identify the nature of crime committed against a child, and activate the relevant authority,” suggests the SSP.

Names changed to protect privacy and identity

The writer tweets @ASYusuf