May 18, 2006	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 19, 1427

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PESHAWAR, May 17: A father of two on Wednesday criticised weak security at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ repatriation centres and said that he had found his children, kidnapped five days ago, in a refugee resettlement camp near Kabul, adding he might have killed their kidnapper.

Four and a half years old Kainat and three and a half years old Salar were kidnapped from their schools by an Afghan refugee last Thursday, said the children’s father, a motor-mechanic living in the Tehkal Payan area on the Jamrud Road.

“On Thursday morning, I accompanied my wife to see a doctor in Badhber’s Bazidkehl area after sending Kainat and Salar to their schools,” he said.

He said one of his Afghan friends named Qurban had called him up at the clinic and told him that he had seen his children at the refugee repatriation centre on the Jamrud Road.

He said that he went to their schools and the repatriation centre but could not find them despite the best of his efforts.

He said that he immediately rushed to the Torkham border and travelled to Kabul after getting the information that the Afghan refugees were being settled at a camp near Pul-i-Charkhi area in the suburbs of the Afghan capital.

By Thursday night, he said, he reached Kabul and found an Afghan security man, who used to live near his house in Peshawar.

On the same night, he and the Afghan security man went to Pul-i-Charkhi camp and managed to find Kainat and Salar, who were staying with the kidnapper.

Seeing the Afghan kidnapper, the mechanic said, he attacked him with sharp-edged instrument.

“I may have killed the kidnapper because I stabbed him several times in extreme anger,” he said.

Later, he said, he was arrested by security men at the refugee camp, but he evaded detention by bribing them handsomely and finally managed to return to Peshawar along with his children.

“What were the security personnel at the UNHCR repatriation centre doing? Was it not their responsibility to ensure that every Afghan family was taking its own children to Afghanistan?” he said.

An refugee affairs’ official admitted weak security at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’s Kacha Ghari repatriation centre.

Security was termed good at the Takhtabeg repatriation centre in the Khyber Agency but the official said that the Afghan Commissionerate had recently recruited untrained people, who could not verify the bonafides of the refugees’ children.

The official alleged that he had found some Afghans at the UNHCR repatriation centre who were providing children to refugees who were short of a certain number of family members.

Every family member is being given $250 and a sack of wheat to a family with at least five members.

The official said that families, who were short of the required number, ‘hired’ children from a broker, the official maintained.

“The Afghan families must be getting other benefits when they reach camps inside Afghanistan after presenting these children as their own,” he added.

Farmanullah Khan, additional commissioner of security at the Afghan Commissionerate, was unavailable for comments.

However, Capital City Police Officer Habibur Rehman said that the police had set up a check post at the repatriation centre and no incident of kidnapping of children had been reported.

He said that they thoroughly checked every vehicle before it entered the Khyber Agency.