Peshawar mother fears for daughter married to Chinese national

Claims she has not had any contact for over two months, with police unwilling to help

PESHAWAR: The nexus of fake weddings with Chinese men has raised its head in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) as well with news reports prompting a mother to come forward, claiming that she has not heard from her for the past two months.

F*, who hails from the Christian community, told The Express Tribune at the Peshawar Press Club on Sunday that her 19-year-old daughter R* had married a Chinese national, 24-year-old Su Benji from Shandong on February 27 in Peshawar this year.

After their marriage, F said that her daughter and her husband moved to Islamabad. But it has been three months since they have heard from them.

“We have not been allowed to visit China despite repeated requests,” she stated.

The worried mother added that after reports emerged recently that a possible gang could be operating in an organised manner to lure and trap girls, marry them, take them to China where they are either forced into prostitution or are harvested for organs.

“After the fake Chinese marriage scams surfaced in Punjab and Islamabad, we are worried about the whereabouts of our daughter who has been married to a Chinese national but we have not heard from her ever since she moved to the federal capital,” she said, adding that they have also made repeated requests to the women who had helped make the match.

F conceded that their Chinese son-in-law had paid them Rs150,000 as expenses for the marriage ceremony. She further said that unlike some of the other cases, where the Chinese men appeared as suitors and lured women by befriending them online, in their case a member from their community approached them and presented the marriage proposal.

I have also tried to register a first information report (FIR) in Islamabad to trace my daughter, but neither the police nor the Christian community helped me, she claimed.

It is pertinent to mention that this is the second complaint relating to marriage with Chinese nationals in K-P.

In recent weeks, dozens of Chinese nationals along with their Pakistani facilitators and some Chinese-Pakistani couples have been apprehended from different parts of the country by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) over alleged attempts to traffic Pakistani women to China.

Some other Pakistani women, who had married Chinese men but have since returned to their homes — including one from China — reported of domestic abuse at the hands of their husbands.

*NAME WITHHELD TO PROTECT IDENTITY

 

Published in The Express Tribune, May 13^th, 2019.