January 09, 2008	Wednesday	Zilhaj 29, 1428

RAWALPINDI, Jan 8: One of the two mothers whose newborn babies were stolen from a city hospital lost her claim on Tuesday over the custody of an infant found abandoned in Kahuta and adopted by a local woman after the DNA test showed that he was not her son, an official source said.

“Unofficially it has been known that the DNA does not match with Ms Najma,” a source close to the investigation revealed. The DNA test was ordered to verify the parenthood of the baby.

The newborn boy found abandoned at Kahuta and kept in an isolated room under police security at the hospital will now be produced in the court of the district and sessions judge on Wednesday to decide whether he should be handed over to his custodian.

Najma, wife of Tariq, lost her first newborn boy on December 9, when a woman posing herself as an aunt of the baby picked him up from the hospital nursery and disappeared.

Since then Najma along with her family has been waiting for the day when her baby would be recovered and reunited with her.

“We accept that this baby is not our. But we will not go from the hospital unless our baby is returned to us by the hospital staff,” Tariq Mehmood, the father of the missing baby, told Dawn.

In the second case, Marium Bibi, wife of Gul Mohammad Khan, gave birth to a baby boy in the same hospital on Jan 3. Again on the same day, an unidentified woman tricked the mother and stole the baby.

Following information that an abandoned newborn baby had been found in Kahuta and that a woman had adopted him, the police brought the baby to the hospital and produced him before Najma, who claimed that it was her baby.

Later, it was decided to get the DNA test done on the baby, as both the affected mothers were not ready to withdraw their claims on the baby.