On Friday, Urdu News published a detailed report on the return of a missing girl from Lari Adda.
12 years ago, it was reported that 8-year-old Saba Khalil, a resident of Lahore’s Lari Adda, had gone missing. She had gone to the market and got lost on the way back home. After searching for her everywhere, the parents approached the police.
Her father, Mohammad Khalil, used to sell naan chana on a cart in Lari Adda. He has two sons and a daughter.
Failure of the system
This year in May, Punjab’s Inspector General of Police (IGP) Dr. Usman Anwar tasked his subordinates to take an initiative to find the parents of missing children. Mustansar Feroze, Chief of City Traffic Police, has handed responsibility for listing down children who have no guardians and for tracing their relatives to a branch of his department that deals with education.
When the traffic police team compiled the lists of abandoned children in all 42 centres, the Child Protection Bureau came to know of 68 girls whose cases have been closed and whose parents have become almost impossible to trace.
After receiving the list, a three-member traffic police team headed by Traffic Warden Mohsin Abbas Malik started the process of interviewing the children according to the order of the list. Saba Khalil was first in the list.
The traffic police personnel had no training for this work, but they were determined to finish the task. The head of the team, Mohsin Abbas, told Urdu News that when he was interviewing Saba Khalil, the team of the Child Protection Bureau was also present.
“Gaining children’s trust is very difficult,” he stated. Then they started questioning the girl in order to get whatever information they could. “She remembered a few main things: father’s name is Khalil, that he used to drive rickshaws in the area of Lari Adda, and the shop of Mithu chaiwala was near her house. And the tandoor.”
Journey back home
With this basic information, the traffic police team started the process of tracing Saba’s parents.
Mohsin Abbas says that there were three people and all three of them reached the Lari Adda and went in different directions. The child was kept in the car with the child protection team. It was 10:30 in the morning and we decided to ask all the porters at the Lari Adda about Khalil. We had asked everyone for three hours, but no one was found.
When Saba Khalil went missing 12 years ago, the area looked different at the time. Now major changes have taken place including the roads and paths. And for 20-year-old Saba sitting in the car, everything was new now.
Theteam started searching all four sides of Iqbal Park up to Bati Chowk one by one. And they found a man named Khalil, but he was not Saba’s father.
According to Mohsin, a shopkeeper in Taxali said that he knew a Mithu chai wala in a street adjacent to the Lari Adda. “We took him with us and took him to that street, but this Mithu was not the same person because Saba did not recognize that street. But in the same street we found three things together, there was a naan shop and a milk-yogurt shop. There were about 50 houses in this area. We decided to knock on the door of each house.”
At around 2:30, the team went out to the other side of this street and saw another naan shop. Mohsin says that “The owner of this shop, Faqir Hussain, who was working inside, saw the girl and came out and said that he seems to have seen this girl. He asked ‘Is her father’s name Khalil?’ to which we nodded yes,” Abbas recalled.
“He used to live here on rent and a few years ago he set up a shop in the old city side and shifted there. His daughter is also missing.”, recalled Hussain.
It was around 3:30 PM when the traffic police team took Faqir Hussain and left for Phaja Siripaye Chowk.
Mohsin Abbas says that they parked the car, taking Saba with them and started walking towards the naan shop which according to Faqir Hussain was Khalil’s shop. Outside this shop, a person was sitting on a chair and eating. As soon as he mouthed the first bite, his eyes fell on Saba and he became still.
Mohsin says that every single moment is imprinted in his eyes. That man was standing there and his eyes were fixed on the girl. When we got close and he didn’t even notice us, I grabbed his shoulder and shook him. So he came to his senses. I asked if your name is Khalil. So he said yes. I told him to stand and I asked him, “Do you recognize this girl?” To which he replied, “This is my daughter Saba”, and he started crying.
Saba’s father said while crying that “I just observed Friday prayer and cried and prayed for my daughter to find her.”
Many people gathered at the spot. And every eye was full of tears. The father hugged his daughter and remained in a state of disbelief for a long time.
Saba is still with the Child Protection Bureau as she will be handed over to her parents only after completing the legal process.
Urdu News writes that many aspects of this story pose questions about the system itself, about the extent to which there is a lack of communication between the responsible agencies. Saba was just 10 km away from her home for 12 years.
According to official data, the traffic police team has reunited 10 such children with their parents in the last two months.
