LAHORE: Iqbal Town police on Monday registered kidnap case of a five-year-old boy who went missing from Gulshan Iqbal Park on Sunday evening.

Hafiz Fahad of Sabzazar Colony along with his family visited Gulshan Iqbal Park on Sunday evening where his son Muhammad Saad went missing. The family after a thorough search approached the police.

The police through a CCTV footage of the park found that the boy was walking with a middle-aged veiled woman by holding her hand and later they could also be seen leaving the park from gate No 1.

Fahad told Dawn that the family approached the park’s administration and the CCTV footage showed his son was going with the woman.

Iqbal Town SP Shazia Sarwar said the boy was with his family and he was lured by the woman.

Police register kidnap case

She said a team was inspecting CCTV footages from the Punjab Safe City Authority and would [hopefully] recover the boy.

Child rights activist Iftikhar Mubarak said the Supreme Court had taken notice of the increasing missing reports of children in 2017 and constituted a committee headed by the advocate general.

He said the committee after holding meetings with police, teachers, parents, schools’ administrators, child rights activists and social organisations, formulated a report.He said the report had given several suggestions to the government, including developing child safety instruction and including it in school syllabus and also directions for parents and teachers.

He said the government had developed a booklet “Mehfooz Bachy, Mazboot Pakistan” and distributed it among some schools and did not include it in syllabus while other recommendations were also not implemented so far.

Mr Mubarak said the government even could not develop a centralised data on the missing children. “Different social organisations have formulated their data on missing children and child abuse cases.”

The data compiled by Sahil, an organisation working for child rights, showed that a total of 3,445 child abuse cases were reported in the country in 2017, including 1,039 abduction, 517 missing children, 467 rape, 366 sodomy, 206 rape attempt and 109 child marriages. As many as 109 murder after abuse cases were reported.

The report of 2018 will be released in March 2019.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2019