KARACHI– Bodies of two children, missing since May 10, were recovered from a car near the Naya Nazimabad area of Karachi on Wednesday.
The police said that the parents of the children had reported them missing on May 10, but officials were unable to locate them.
After a day of searching, the police registered a case of disappearance.
According to the police report, the windows of the car in which the bodies were found were covered in dust, whereas the locks were broken and could only be opened from the outside.
While the cause of deaths could not immediately be ascertained, the police suspected that, “The children might have got locked inside the car while playing.”
However, the police observed that the cause of death could only be ascertained after a postmortem examination.
Instances of children going missing have become a regular occurrence in most cities of Pakistan.
The issue was even highlighted by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in its flagship annual report released on April 30.
On the release of the report, HRCP’s secretary-general Harris Khalique had pointed out that Pakistan had failed to protect its most vulnerable as reports of child labourers being sexually abused in mines surfaced in Balochistan, while news of young children being raped, murdered and dumped had become frighteningly common.
Moreover, on March 4, the Senate passed the Zainab Alert Recovery and Response Bill, 2020 aimed at raising awareness, response and recovery of missing and abducted children.
The bill was passed to pave way for conducting trials of child abduction cases in anti-terrorism courts established under the ATA 1997.
The bill was passed two years after the brutal rape and murder of nine-year-old Zainab Ansari in Kasur, that shook the nation’s collective conscience in 2018.
The horrific incident had drawn a countrywide outrage and raised questions over the safety of children and responsibilities on the part of the authorities concerned to prevent increasing incidents of child abuse in the country.
