SAHIWAL: The district police on Friday traced the two girls, who fled from their school, at a ‘hideout’ in Lahore.

A police team raided a place in Allama Iqbal Town and recovered the two students, who had ‘stayed’ there with two boys. The police arrested three people in this connection.

District Police Officer Syed Khurram Ali told reporters at the Civil Lines police station that the girls could have been sold out to a prostitution racket or smuggled to Dubai. Both girls admitted they ran from the school to escape “poverty at their homes,” he revealed.

The police recovered four mobile phones and 25 SIMs from the girls, said the DPO who added that investigation confirmed that no schoolteacher or headmistress of the Government Girls Model Pilot Secondary School was directly or indirectly involved in the girls’ missing case.

He said the police would drop cases against the sports teacher who the two families had suspected of having been involved in the case.

Two students had gone missing during school timings on Oct 21 and the panicked parents blamed the administration and their sports teacher for their disappearance.

The Fateh Sher police interrogated the headmistress, sports teacher and seven other teachers.

The DPO revealed that the girls had planned to escape homes and travelled to Lahore, where they stayed at an Iqbal Town flat. They also spent some time at Gulshan-i-Iqbal Park. He said Imdad Khan, the SHO of a Lahore police station, tracked them down and captured them along with two boys.

The DPO urged the school administration to take measures to prevent escape of students during school hours.

EDO Education Mr Amin and headmistress Shagufta Sarfaraz, while speaking to the media, expressed their elation at the recovery of both girls.

“None of schoolteachers is directly or indirectly involved in this unfortunate incident,” the headmistress said.

Several minority groups had protested against sports teacher’s interrogation and the DPO pledged that cases against her would be dropped.

Later, the two girls admitted that they fled their homes according to a plan. “Poverty and maltreatment compelled us to take the dangerous route of running from the school,” they told Dawn.

One of them is the daughter of a driver and the other of a warder at the Central Jail.

SP Investigation Riffat Bokhari says investigations show that poverty and joint family woes made the two girls desperate.

The DPO said the police could not take any action against the girls as “there is no complainant against them”.

Published in Dawn, October 25th, 2014