PESHAWAR, May 26: A judicial magistrate on Thursday ordered release of eight scavengers, a day after the social welfare directorate arrested them on vagrancy charges. The scavengers were aged between 8 and 11 years.

The court said it viewed the boys’ arrest as “a violation of the law by officials of the Welfare Home for Child Beggars” and called for their release once their parents furnished surety bonds of Rs10,000 each.

Magistrate Rashid Rauf Swathi directed the manager of the welfare home, Tariq Khan, to immediately contact the boys’ parents and hand them over to them. However, he said, if the boys were not set free for some reason, they should be produced before the court again.

The court said the staff of the Welfare Home for Child Beggars needed adequate training in order to avoid unnecessary complications and ensure that legal procedures were followed. A copy of the magistrate’s order was sent to the head of the directorate of social welfare and women development.

The magistrate asked Mr Tariq about the law invoked to arrest the boys. The court was told that the boys were arrested under the Vagrancy Ordinance during a crackdown on child beggars. The magistrate asked him under which provision could a child be arrested and detained by the directorate. The manager gave no reply.

The court observed that the officials were themselves unaware of the law and instead of providing welfare to the children they had further complicated their case.

The boys wept in the courtroom and insisted that they were scavengers and not beggars. They said they used to retrieve useful items from garbage dumps and sell the same to scrap dealers. The boys wore shabby clothes and their faces were grimy and unwashed. Their parents did not know about their arrest.

The court observed that the boys were in a miserable condition and were not properly cared for by welfare home officials. They were neither given a bath nor were their clothes changed even though they had been arrested a whole day before, it said.

Furthermore, the court observed that the official was himself not trained or acquainted with the law — factors that led to what he called “welfare complications”.

One of the detained boys, Ikram, told Dawn that he had become a scavenger following the death of his father a few years ago. All the boys were sobbing uncontrollably as they boarded a vehicle of the welfare home.