Another missing child found dead in Peshawar

Five-year-old went missing on February 4; ghastly trend continues since April 2015 with no action taken

PESHAWAR:

Zubair, 5, went missing from his house on February 4. He was found dead, face down in shallow fungus-crusted water collecting in an empty plot near his house 25 days later.

Zubair’s family isn’t the first to endure this suffering. By now there should be nothing mysterious about children going missing only to turn up dead, some bodies mutilated, others quietly buried in the unquestioning burden of grief. With the police and Child Protection and Welfare Commission unable or unwilling to connect the dots, it is difficult to say when this started. Research done by The Express Tribune suggests April of 2015 was when the ghastly trend surfaced.



Zubair, 5, 2011-16

The second child of Afghan refugee Naseer, Zubair went missing on February 4 from Tehkal Payan village. Zubair was not the strongest of Naseer’s four offspring; his father told The Express Tribune his five-year-old was vulnerable because he suffered some undiagnosed mental condition.

Every effort to locate Zubair failed.

Naseer, neither rich nor powerful, reached out to Tehkal police, requesting they register an FIR. Instead, they registered a roznamcha report, a step below.

The family was about to give up its quest, when Zubair was found close to home but dead.

His parents removed the remains of their child and silently laid him to rest. After the funeral, Naseer went to Tehkal police to inform them; the police did not ask too many questions.

“I am a poor man – a gardener. My son went missing and we tried our best to locate him but we failed, completely,” Naseer told The Express Tribune. “One day, some children were playing nearby when their ball went to the pond and they went to retrieve it.” And that’s when they found Zubair.

“He had fallen on his face in the pond and remained [close by] for 25 days while we were searching for him everywhere but there.”



The miracle you see

According to Naseer, who is not a medical forensic expert, Zubair’s body had not decomposed. “It’s just a miracle; the body was fresh. It was just slightly bloated,” he said.

“I don’t suspect any foul play. It was just an accident,” said the grieving father.

“I bathed him myself. There were no cuts or any sign on his small body,” Naseer was adamant Zubair’s death was just a terrible turn of events with no evil at play. His neighbours also seemed to agree.

A Tehkal policeman said they registered a roznamcha when Zubair went missing, broadcasting the information to other officers to look for him. He said when they learned his body was found and he had “accidently fallen in the pond”, they saw nothing suspicious to pursue.

The forensics

Cantt SP Kashif Zulfiqar told The Express Tribune the human body starts to decompose within 48 hours of death. He believed it was unusual Zubair’s body had not decomposed much if it was in water for 25 days.

“But the problem is the parents did not see anything suspicious, so the father did not tell the police [anything to go on],” he added.

Science writer Mo Costandi explains it in an article published in The Guardian on May 5, 2015: “Decomposition begins several minutes after death, with a process called autolysis, or self-digestion [...] Bloating is often used as a marker for the transition between early and later stages of decomposition.” Zubair’s time of death could have been determined had there been a protocol in place to investigate when missing children turn up death. The science suggests Zubair had not been lying dead for 25 days.

When asked if some of these deaths were related to organ trade as parents suspected body parts had been removed from their child’s remains, Zulfiqar said it was a possibility. “But it can only be confirmed with an autopsy.”

The silent State

Zulfiqar suggested the state should be the complainant in cases where children are found dead under suspicious circumstances so that police would be bound to conduct an autopsy for each death to confirm the causes of the death against the wishes of the parents.

According to child rights activist Arshad Mahmood, the deaths piling up need proper police investigation to find out if there are disparate reasons or do some of these cases share a modus operandi.



“The K-P government has to establish an efficient child protection system. The Child Protection and Welfare Act, 2010 was introduced years ago but its rules have not been notified yet,” Mahmood told The Express Tribune. “[Sikandar Sherpao] should call a meeting of the Child Protection and Welfare Commission on a quarterly basis; there’s been hardly one or two all these years.”

Mahmood shared the commission’s budget was around Rs10 million – only enough to pay the staff and nothing else.

Another child rights activist, Imran Takkar, lashed out at the government for inaction. “This commission is meant to support the cause of child rights but its employees are more interested in drawing a salary,” he said.

“Several children have been brutally killed in the province without inviting any attention,” said Takkar.

Referring to Zubair’s death, he said, “It could’ve been accidental but an autopsy should’ve been done.”

Chinks in the chain

Police were initially alarmed when children started vanishing. With fruitless investigations, they dropped their guard, and the matter.

The transfer of Banamarhi DPS Rokhan Zeb, City SP Afzal and eventually SSP Operations Dr Mian Saeed shoved the matter to the remote backlogs of institutional memory, to be altogether forgotten by the police.

ILLUSTRATION / DESIGN : TALHA KHAN

When the heart stops

Starting April 2015, many children have gone missing in Peshawar. These are some of the cases tracked by The Express Tribune:

Welfare dept fails to submit report on missing children

Feb 29, 2016

Zubair, 5, was found dead in a body of water collecting in a plot in Tehkal

Sept 1, 2015

Badabher police recovered a 10-year-old’s body near a canal. Another child was also found dead from a canal in the same police station’s jurisdiction

June 1, 2015

Sudas, 5, was found dead in a canal in Badhu Samarbagh

May 29, 2015

Amana, a young schoolgirl, went missing from Dabgari on May 16 and was found dead in Srikot. Both her arms had been cut off. The police told the family the remains were three-days old but her grandfather believed she was killed within the last 24 hours

May 16, 2015

Amina, 10, went to school and never came home. Living within the limits of Shah Qabool police station, Amina’s remains were found in Haripur district

May 1, 2015

Zikria, 5, went missing in April from Banamarhi police precinct in April. When his body was found in Akbarpura, Nowshera, his family suspected organ theft as there was a long incision on his abdomen. No autopsy was done and no one was asked why

April 11, 2015

The body of a four-year-old was found within the jurisdiction of Banamarhi police. The child, unidentified, had several fingers missing. His body bore cut marks. Also in April, Iqra went missing from Yakatoot and her body was found a week later in a canal. The family quietly buried their girl, thinking it was an accidental death

Published in The Express Tribune, March 12^th, 2016.