TRAUMATISED, Khalil Ahmad has asked his father to arrange home schooling until he is strong enough to face the world. It has been 11 days since he was rescued from his ‘master’ in Mandi Bahauddin district, to whom he had been sold by his kidnappers. Now, though he may be physically free, the fear and hurt for this 12-year-old are permanent. He has harrowing memories from his time in captivity, and over these past few days has not once ventured outside his home.

Khalil was one of 13 children who were kidnapped or had gone missing from Lahore last month. Of them, he is the only one to have been recovered safely. He disappeared on July 14 from his residence in Mughalpura, and endured a week-long ordeal.

“They forced me to work as a helping hand at weddings, washing dishes etc,” he tells Dawn. The slave drivers who had got their labour so cheap didn’t take kindly to sluggish work. “Later in the night they would beat workers who they thought were not giving their 100 per cent.”

The child was kept in a dingy, filthy room at a place he describes as a “factory owned by an influential man”. The boys were in the charge of an elderly man from the north-western part of the country, according to Khalil’s understanding. “He would escort us to and from the workplace daily,” he says. “We were locked up for the night.” He adds that the boys were strictly told not to talk to strangers at the workplace.

Meanwhile, Khalil’s parents lived through a nightmare of their own. “The disappearance of my son had landed on me and my sick wife like a bombshell,” says his father, Mohammad Alam. They searched for the boy desperately and eventually sought help from the police.

Mercifully, the break for which some parents await a lifetime came early in this case. “On the third day [after Khalil had gone missing] I got a call from an unknown man who said he could arrange a telephonic conversation with my son,” Mohammad explains. This was a huge relief, giving the despairing family hope that Khalil was still alive. The caller asked for Rs5,000 sent through a mobile payments platform. “He asked me to arrange another Rs50,000 for information on Khalil’s whereabouts and then disconnected after warning me against telling the police about it.”

Mohammad had few options. He didn’t simply have the resources to meet the demand; so he went to the police.

“After seeking permission from the police high command, we traced the caller. We learned that the caller was frequently changing locations,” says Abid Bhatti, who is in charge of the investigation section at the Mughalpura police station. “Finally, helped by evidence gathered, a night raid was planned. A police team went knocking at the doors of a house in Badami Bagh and arrested two men, Mohammad Aslam and Nasir Shah, who used to supply young boys for labour.” The police say that they also recovered from the place three kidnapped boys the criminals were planning to hand over to other parties the next morning.

According to the police, during interrogation Aslam revealed that he had sold Khalil to a factory owner from Mandi Bahauddin. He said he had been working for many people in various districts, providing them with boys aged between some 10 and 15 years as “cheap labour”.

As per the police inquiries, these men initially used to abduct runaway boys from the Lahore railway station, Data Darbar, Badami Bagh and Minar-i-Pakistan. However, as the demand for manpower increased, they turned to kidnapping. “During the past two years, they abducted and supplied over 50 children from various parts of the city,” says the police officer.

The police say they recovered 30 captives, including six children, from the Mandi Bahauddin factory. “Khalil was also there,” says officer Abid, adding that such a network of criminals and modus operandi has been unearthed for the first time. The police team also arrested the owner of the factory, Nasir Jutt.

The Punjab police figures also speak of the intensity of the issue. Submitted to the Supreme Court of Pakistan in a suo motu case, these figures show that 767 children were either kidnapped or went missing in Punjab during the first six months of 2016. The highest number of children vanished from Lahore, followed by Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Faisalabad and Sheikhupura. Of them, 52 are yet to be recovered. In 2015, the report says, 41 children of the total 1,134 are still missing. Furthermore, 139 children who disappeared between 2011 and June 2016 were not reunited with their families. No one is aware of what happened to them and in what conditions they may be living.

Despite this, the police treat the disappearance of children as a socio-economic issue rather a crime — perhaps since most victims come from poor families and low-income areas.

Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2016