Islamabad : April 5 was a good day for Rukhsana Kausar, 32, after her one-year-old son, who went missing from the Bari Imam Shrine, was found alive in the same area almost a week earlier.
On March 31, 2015, Rahim Abbas was kidnapped from the shrine near his house in Muslim Colony.
“I have no words to describe my feelings…I have spent past five days just worrying about my son,” .
Kausar is from Jhelum district and has been living in Muslim Colony for the past 20 years. Abbas is the youngest of her four children.
While sharing details, Kausar said that on March 31, she went to a local dispensary with her children for medical checkups. On their way back, she stopped at the shrine because her oldest asked for a drink of water, and she handed over the infant to her daughter.
Kausar said that while she was with the older boy, an unidentified woman came and asked her daughter to fetch her some flowers from a nearby stall, while promising to hold the baby. Her daughter handed over the boy to the woman, Kausar said, after which the woman escaped from the site with the boy in hand.
“It was the worst day of my life,” she said.
Kausar went to Secretariat Police Station to file a case, but said that the police did not take much interest.
She said that on April 5, neighbours noticed the boy crawling in the street and handed him over to her. Secretariat Additional SHO Ghafoor admitted that the police did not play any role in the recovery and it was “plain luck” that he was found.
The officer said that the entire episode was due to the mother’s own negligence. He said that the police had obtained CCTV footage in which the unidentified woman was clearly seen holding the infant. Ghafoor said that the footage was sent to the National Database and Registration Authority, but no record of the woman was found. The officer suspected that the woman kidnapped the infant but was unable to transport him out of the city, so she abandoned the child in the colony.
