KARACHI, Dec 4: An incident of purported kidnapping of nine children on Monday took a mysterious turn after the Edhi Foundation and the police made conflicting claims. According to a spokesman for the Edhi Foundation, the children were ‘kidnapped’ from an ambulance which was shifting them from the Clifton centre to the Sohrab Goth centre of the foundation.

But a police official contradicted the Edhi account, saying that no kidnapping had taken place as the foundation was removing the children against their will. The Edhi spokesman retorted by claiming that poverty had forced the children’s parents to leave them in the foundation’s care.

The story took yet another twist late in the night when the Clifton TPO claimed that `unknown men’ had succeeded in `freeing’ the children from the custody of the Edhi Foundation’s workers.

Earlier in the day, an Edhi official broke the story by informing Dawn that seven girls and two boys were kidnapped while they were being shifted from the Clifton centre to the Sohrab Goth centre in an ambulance. When the vehicle was near the British High Commission on Shara-e-Iran, it was intercepted by some people.

These people beat up the driver and manhandled the 60-year-old nanny accompanying the children, before forcing them into a waiting car.