High-ups urged to help recover kidnapped girl
By Javed Aziz Khan - May 07, 2009
PESHAWAR: A gang of kidnappers, picking up young girls from parts of Peshawar and Nowshera, has sold a 14-year-old girl of Jalozai village to a law-enforcer in Rajanpur after she was abducted while on way to school in February last year.
A number of females went missing from parts of Peshawar and Nowshera during the past months and were either recovered after payment of ransom or were sold against huge amounts of money. Some of them were later recovered even from brothels.
Ruqayya, 14, a resident of New Jalozai near Cherat Cantonment, left for her school along with another girl on February 20 but did not return home. Later, it was disclosed that unidentified people picked her up from the main Cherat Road in the jurisdiction of Pabbi Police Station of Nowshera district.
The family lodged a First Information Report at the police station concerned. Two suspects were arrested while police raided a suspicious house in Kohat, but the girl could not be recovered.
The family later visited some suspicious places in Rawalpindi, Peshawar and many parts of the Punjab to find any clue to the girl, as her ailing mother’s condition worsened after her daughter went missing. “We later discovered that Ruqayya has been kept in the house of an army soldier, Abdul Kareem son of Muhammad Ali, resident of Fajalwali Kotla Dewan, Jampur in Rajanpur district,” alleged Ahmad Shah, elder brother of the missing girl.
The aggrieved person said that the family approached Kareem, who first admitted that he had paid money to a kidnapper against Ruqayya. “Later, he denied paying money to anyone, arguing Ruqayya had married him in the local court on February 20 of her own sweet will,” the brother of the missing girl said, arguing neither the solider had served in his area nor her sister had been to Rajanpur so where they had met.
The fact, Shah added, is that Ruqayya was engaged and her ‘nikah’ was concluded with a cousin during the engagement, thus her second ‘nikah’ in the presence of first one was illegal and unethical.
“As our sister is in the custody of a soldier, he is pressuring her to give the statement of his choice. We also approached the seniors of the soldier, who conducted an inquiry into the matter but gave a clean chit to their man,” alleged Ahmad Shah.
The brother of the missing girl said their father worked as Khadim-e-Kaaba for the past 15 years while his mother was a heart patient. “We appeal to President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, governors of NWFP and Punjab and Chief of Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to help recover our young sister from the custody of the soldier,” Ahmad Shah said.
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