PESHAWAR, Nov 5: Incidents of kidnapping for ransom have increased over the past few months in Peshawar but many such cases have not been registered by police, inquiries show.
Ms Tahira, a resident of Shah Qabool, went to a police station on Sept 7 to report that her 14-year-old son Nowshad Hussain, a student of class 7 in the Pakistan Air Force school, had not returned home from the school.
She said her son had been kidnapped, but the Shah Qabool police entered the case in their daily-report as 'missing'. "One month has passed and I have no news about my son," Ms Tahira said.
A senior police official said that picking up a person and taking him to tribal areas was always an easy job for kidnappers. About registration of a case in the daily-report as missing, he said: "The reason is obvious, the police want to show that they are maintaining the law and order and curbing crimes effectively."
It has been observed that sometimes police register a case after a person has been recovered either by police or returns after paying the ransom to his captores.
According to the police record, 16 cases of kidnapping were registered in 2003. But this year the number has already risen to 18. However, the exact number of the kidnapped persons is not known as they are considered missing by the police.
The Frontier Constabulary recovered seven taxi drivers along with their vehicles earlier this year. The police had not registered any kidnapping case in respect of these persons who were kidnapped from Peshawar and Charsadda districts and taken to Dara Adamkhel.
In another incident about two-and-a-half months ago, taxi driver Gul Shehzad, a resident of the railway quarters area, was kidnapped when some female passengers asked him to take them to the Shan Ghunda hamlet in the Mohmand Agency.
Gul Shehzad, his taxi No RIT 6136, was not allowed to return until his family paid Rs115,000 as ransom to his captors. His family members told Dawn that they had gone to the East Cantonment police station to lodge an FIR, but the police refused to register the case. They registered the complaint in the daily-report as missing, the sources said.
A senior police official conceded that there was an increase in the kidnapping cases in Peshawar during the past few months. Official sources said there were well-organized gangs of kidnappers in the Khyber Agency and Dara Adamkhel but they attributed problems in curbing the heinous crime to two different systems of administration that are in practice in tribal areas and Peshawar.
"When we gather information about the presence of a kidnap victim in the tribal area, we inform the political authorities in the concerned agency but due to their non-cooperation in such cases the kidnappers remain at large," official sources observed.
NWFP Governor Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah at a meeting with the law enforcement agencies on Wednesday expressed concern over the law and order situation in the province, particularly the increase in kidnapping cases. He said the political administrations must have an effective mechanism at the local level to identify the kidnappers and locate the kidnap victims.
