KARACHI, Nov 21: The horrified 10-year-old boy stood pale and dazed on Thursday as he narrated his 36-hour-long ordeal he suffered at the hands of a group of criminals. His parents and sister were relieved to the extent that after all they had the boy back alive.

Shahid had gone missing on Saturday morning, leaving the parents to desperately search for him everywhere they hoped to find him. It was late in the afternoon the next day when they decided to lodge a report at the police post in Altaf Town.

On Sunday night, however, the boy reeled back into the house being helped by a acquaintance.

According to his mother, the boy left his home on Saturday morning at about 9am to open his shoe-mending ‘shop’ in advance of his father’s arrival there. When Sharif, his father, arrived at the make-shift stall in Bhitai Colony around 10am, the boy was missing from the workplace. Casually, he began looking for him. The anxiety grew with the passage of time and the search intensified. Shahid was nowhere to be found.

Nobody had any clue to his whereabouts. People commiserated with the family, joined in the search and flooded them with varied advice. Among them was a youngster who later turned out to be an informer of the criminals. It is suspected that this young man had tipped the group that the victim’s mother was going to approach the area police.

In a quivering voice, Shahid told Dawn that two young men whom he knew from his hometown Lodhran, in southern Punjab, asked him to accompany them to a nearby shop. When he refused saying that his father would be angry for his being away from the place, they pushed and prodded him along.

“They took me to a house in Kalapul. Then they played a movie, with Sunny Deol as hero.” Shahid said they switched their moods from friendly to hostile when he said he wanted to go home as his family would be worried about him.

In the evening, they took him to Darussalam Housing Society, off Korangi Road, across the Islamic Mission Hospital. “They shoved me to a house and into its underground room. It was completely dark.”

Some men were already present in the dungeon. He said he was gagged with cotton waste before they began their beastly game. He could count them up to five. “Later they gave me some drink and told me to ‘drink water’.”

He did not know what happened next. The next day when he woke up, he found the door locked from outside. Helpless, he cried briefly, and passed the long agonizing hours alone. In the evening, however, two men took him out and dropped him at the Korangi Crossing bus stop.

“When he came home, he was not in his senses,” said his mother. “He was helped by the video-game man, who knew about Shahid’s vanishing.”

The perpetrators were apparently not paedophilic maniacs. They might have wrecked vengeance on the boy in a matrimonial feud that has its roots in Lodhran. His sister could not get along with the man she was married to a year ago and now lives with her parents. The culprits, all hailing from Lodhran, work as masons and construction workers and live temporarily where they have work at hand.

The family are in a dilemma. His captors had threatened Shahid that if his parents tried to contact the police, they would take him away for good. They also fear that if they keep silent, the offenders would get emboldened.

On Tuesday the mother of the boy went to a local NGO’s office which claims to be providing legal and social help to people in distress. She was told that the office opens between 8am and 2pm. The next day when she went there at 11am, she was asked to come after Eid as the ‘madam’ was out on vacation.

The family has not yet lodged a report with the police. Neither have they had the boy medically examined for a future legal requirement. They want the culprits to be punished. But they don’t know how to go about it. — Naseer Ahmad