A loudspeaker tied to a minaret of a mosque makes an unpleasant sound as it is turned on. “Listen intently to this announcement,” a voice commands, “a child named Taha*, who is wearing beige shalwar kameez, has gone missing from the zoo. If you find him please contact the mosque.”
Taha’s family had gone out for a picnic earlier that day. While his parents and extended family shared a laugh, he went towards a cage fascinated by the monkeys inside. A woman donning a black chador was watching him intently. As he gleefully ran further from his family and towards an ice cream stall, the woman followed him. Maintaining a safe distance from his parents, she grabbed him with her chador and quietly exited the zoo.
Subsequently, the child’s photo and description were posted around the city. After 200 days, Taha’s parents had almost lost hope when the phone rang — someone had left a tip. “A beggar in Pakhtunabad matches this description,” a man had told the Roshni Helpline, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) working primarily for the protection of children.
In a raid, the police, along with Roshni Helpline, found Taha and two other children tied to a charpoy at a house in Pakhtunabad. The young boys’ captors had planned to sell them forward to another ‘group’ in upper Sindh.
Taha was recovered in a fragile mental state. He looked nothing like his former self. With a shaved head, piercings in both ears, and cigarette burns on various body parts, his own mother could not recognise the boy.
This was back in 2006, a year when kidnappings were supposedly at a low. The Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) reports that 28 individuals — of all ages — were kidnapped that year.
Roshni’s president, Muhammad Ali, shares a different story, one where children from underprivileged backgrounds are frequently kidnapped, with law enforcers failing to recognise these disappearances as abductions.
A numbers war
The situation remains largely unchanged 10 years later. As per CPLC data, this year 15 individuals were kidnapped in Karachi up till June 22. Representatives of the Roshni Helpline believe that these stats are based primarily on FIRs, and thus are inaccurate.
Mr Ali points out that there’s a rich-poor divide when it comes to the handling of kidnapping cases by the police. He explains that when a child, specifically one from a low-income household, goes missing, the police tells the parents that the child may be lost and could come back in a few days, or that these might be ‘runaway’ cases. This means that the child has left of its own accord. In these cases, the police file a NC report (non-cognisable offence report) in their roznamcha diary, instead of lodging an FIR.
Children do run away from their homes, but as per patterns noticed by Mr Ali, they are usually over the age of 10. On the other hand, younger children with limited decision-making skills are kidnapped for various reasons. “Infants up to the age of two are picked up for false adoption, children between the ages of one and six are picked up by the begging mafia or for the purpose of bonded labour, while some children are picked up for sex crimes. In cases from underprivileged areas, very rarely are children picked up for ransom,” says Mr Ahmed Raza, programme manager Roshni Helpline.
“Only ‘kidnapping for ransom’ cases, where an industrialist’s child has been kidnapped, are considered abductions here. In these instances, often, the FIR book is sent to the kidnapped person’s house and an FIR is lodged swiftly and with no fuss,” says Mr Ali.
Talking numbers in kidnapping cases is not easy. CPLC’s assistant chief, Shabbar Malik, maintains that the organisation’s statistics are not compiled from FIRs alone, but are recorded from various sources. “All the data that CPLC shares is backed with proper evidence. Whether it is based on a call, email or fax, everything is recorded and verifiable.”
CPLC also assists families in getting FIRs lodged. “Often, people are reluctant to go to the police; they come to us because we keep them comfortable. Our priority is the safe release of victims,” says Mr Malik.
Yet, the numbers do not match. If Roshni’s 2015 annual report is to be believed, 2,160 children went missing under mysterious circumstances that year in Karachi. This number, they say, is compiled and verified from reports by the organisation’s volunteers, reports gathered on the NGO’s website and social media pages, newspaper reports and roznamcha diary entries of various police stations.
While a good number of these children may have been runaway cases, enclosed in these figures are cases of kidnappings not recorded in FIR books.
Laws of selection
Nine-year-old Roma was playing outside her house in Machar Colony when she was kidnapped. On July 16, a day after her disappearance, her father frantically went to the police station. The police filed a missing persons report at the time and sent him home.
Roma’s body was found 15 days later, dumped near Islam Chowk. “The medico-legal officer of Civil Hospital has confirmed the girl was strangled,” Docks Station House Officer Amin Marri had reportedly said following the incident. The medico-legal officer also confirmed that the child had been raped before being killed.
Only after the horrific incident, a FIR was lodged against the culprits. Enraged, Roma’s family took to the streets to protest what they believe was a case of police negligence.
Additional IG Sindh Sohail Jokhio does not see why citizens should have any problems getting an FIR lodged. “The IG has given clear instructions that even if a bike is stolen or someone’s purse is stolen, an FIR must be lodged,” he says.
Mr Jokhio does concede that, “sometimes the police may say that check around your area, keep a lookout at hospitals for 24 hours, and if the child still does not turn up an FIR is lodged”.
He shares that for the convenience of citizens, there is also the option of lodging an FIR online. A dedicated unit looks at these complaints.
“The problem here is not that there is no law,” says human rights lawyer Faisal Siddiqi.
The law is clear. As per Pakistan Penal Code’s section 364-A “Kidnapping or abducting a person under the age of 14,” can be punishable by “death or with imprisonment for life or with rigorous imprisonment for a term which may extend to 14 years and shall not be less than seven years.”
Mr Siddiqi clarifies that a child going missing is not an offence; the police are not legally bound to lodge an FIR. “The police have a legal justification: they can say the parents have been unable to show that an offence has taken place. If parents say that they suspect that their child has been kidnapped, then it is an offence — even if the family cannot say who may have kidnapped the child,” he further explains.
The advocate believes that the problem is also not the implementation of law either, “as liberals believe”. The real problem, “the crux of the matter, is access to the legal system. You can access it through connections or a lawyer, [but] people from lower-income brackets have neither,” he adds.
High stakes
Child abductions continues to be a large problem in Karachi — Mr Ali shares that for the last three to four years, the localities of Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Landhi, Korangi, Bin Qasim and Baldia have been high-risk areas, with a large number of reported missing children.
He does caution however that there is more than one way to read the data. “The city has about 114 police stations, if particular police stations are reporting a higher number of abductions; it may be because now a culture has been cultivated in these stations, where people’s reports are actually recorded.” Even if a tad over optimistic, this does sound like a sliver of hope in a persistently murky scenario.
*Name has been changed to protect identity
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 14th, 2016