Exactly 31 days after being kidnapped, four-year-old Malayka returned home. Like many other kidnapping cases in which the kidnapped persons returned home, in this case, too, the parents had to pay an unspecified amount of ransom to the kidnappers.

Malayka’s mother was murdered when she was four-month old and she was subsequently adopted by her mother’s cousin, Mohammad Shafiq, a property dealer. She was kidnapped from the main gate of her house in Chistiabad (New Town police area) on December 15, 2011 at around 2pm.

On Dec 20, Mr Shafiq received a hand-written note on a plain paper from the kidnappers in which they asked him to wait for their telephone call. The letter had been glued to the door of his office.

After four days, when he did not receive a phone call, Shafiq lodged an FIR with the New Town police on Dec 24, 2011 and reported that Malayka had not returned home nor was anyone aware of her whereabouts despite a door-to-door search. He nominated his tenant – who lived in the same double storey house – as a suspect in the FIR.

Mr Shafiq finally received a call from the kidnappers on Dec 26 in which they demanded ransom for the safe return of his daughter. Initially, the kidnappers demanded Rs10 million, then brought it down to Rs5 million and later to Rs500,000.

The parents do not want to reveal the final figure paid to the kidnappers in Peshawar.

“My daughter was released by the kidnappers in the street. She walked back home but she was frightened,” Shafiq said. During her month-long captivity, she never spoke to her parents and had her arms and legs tied with ropes, marks of which are still visible. So far the girl has been brave enough to recall some details of where she had been held: a small compound with two rooms and a courtyard having logs and a fireplace in some rural area.

“But she is still deeply traumatised – she starts crying whenever a stranger comes to the house,” Shafiq said.

Sabir Nadeem, the deputy superintendent of police (DSP) who is leading the investigation into the case, revealed that the main suspect had been arrested by the police but he had not confessed to the crime. His wife nominated in the FIR was still at large.

The DSP was reluctant to give details of the case as he attributed the girl’s safe return to police vigilance and great assistance from the newly-established Information Technology (IT) Laboratory at the CIA Centre. The IT Laboratory helps the police track down culprits involved in kidnapping for ransom, robbery and murder cases and the police believe that its success rate in solving crimes is 99 per cent.

However, the key and most obvious question here is if the police vigilance is so up to the mark, why Malayka couldn’t be recovered by the police without the exchange of money or the culprits arrested. In this case neither has happened. The police seriously need to buckle up and bring results to win over the citizens’ trust.