‘Only 19 of 900 kidnap complaints filed in 2012 were genuine’

Girl trying to run away offloaded from bus on Wednesday.

BAHAWALPUR:

A girl was caught by the police on Wednesday night within an hour of boarding a bus to Karachi. Police said the bus was stopped on the directions of the district police officer after the girl’s family reported her elopement.

She was handed over to the family, DPO Sohail Habib Tajik told a press conference shortly afterwards.

He said in 2012, 900 kidnapping cases were registered, of which 300 were found to be false during initial investigation.

Of the rest, 19 were ‘genuine’ abduction cases, while in 581 cases, the women had left home of their free will but were reported by their families as kidnapped.

Talking about the Wednesday’s case, the DPO said that he was visiting the bus terminal when he saw the girl’s family protesting there.



He said he was told that their daughter had left in a bus to Karachi moments ago. The DPO said he ordered the terminal staff to locate the bus and stop it. A police team recovered the girl from the bus in Bahadurabad.

He said the girl said that she was going to meet a man, whom she had wanted to marry. She said her parents had turned down his proposal and that she had left her home of her free will.

She was handed over to the family.



In another case, he said, a girl had been reported missing from a college hostel on January 2, 2013. He said her family had registered a kidnapping case with Uch Sharif police station. The girl, he said, returned three days later, saying that she had gone to meet some friend in another city.

He said after another kidnapping complaint registered at the Civil Lines police station in Bahawalpur, the woman had said that she had left her home to marry a man in Faisalabad. After she told the police that she did not want to return to her parents’ home and that she had not been kidnapped or forced, the DPO said, the case was dropped.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2013.