DERA GHAZI KHAN:
Four of the five women kidnapped from Sakhi Sarwar shrine following a suicide blast on April 3 have been sold in Barkhan district of Balochistan, Muhammad Sarfaraz, whose wife was among them was told.
Sarfaraz said he went to Barkhan and met some men who said they had been involved in trading women kidnapped and brought there from all over the country. He said he was threatened by Abdul Sattar Esani and Abdul Kareem that he could be killed if he continued looking for his wife.
“They told me that my wife had been sold and that there was no use looking for her,” he said. He said he later met a former Balochistan minister and requested him to help him locate his wife. The minister’s men, he said, took him to one of the camps and showed him around but he could not find his wife. He said four women detained at the camp were sold while he looked on.
Sarfaraz was told about her wife’s fate by Mariam, a Multan resident who had managed to escape from the camp and reach Multan in the third week of April. He said Mariam had identified a photograph of her wife he showed her and told him that she had been detained with her at the camp in Barkhan.
Sarfaraz said earlier he had tried to lodge a complaint with the Sakhi Sarwar border military police station but it was not registered. He said he had also met the political agent of the area and requested him to help track his wife.
Talking to The Express Tribune, Political Agent Wali Mohammad admitted that five women had been kidnapped from the area that fell under the jurisdiction of the BMP. However, he said, the women had been taken to Balochistan and that BMP had no authority to take any action there.
He said a meeting of commissioners of Barkhan and Dera Ghazi Khan would soon be arranged to devise some way of tracking and recovering the kidnapped women.
Mariam, who earlier worked as a house maid in Multan, told The Tribune that following the blasts on April 3, an elderly woman told her she would take her to a safe place.
“I had gone to the shrine alone.
I thought the woman will help me get out safely,” she said. She said the two of them went to a house from where onwards she lost consciousness.
She said when she regained consciousness, she found out that she had been kidnapped and brought to Barkhan. She said she paid Rs180 to a bus driver to take her to Multan after fleeing the camp where the five of them had been detained.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 20th, 2011.
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