They left never to return: Bodies of missing children recovered from drain

LAHORE:

City police recovered the dead bodies of two five-year-old children on Saturday from an uncovered drain in Mozang area.

Waqas’s mother said she had sent him to the market with Rs50 to buy bread. She said he had gone to Muawiya’s house on his way to the market. The woman said the family had filed a complaint with Rescue 15 (police helpline) on Friday afternoon after Waqas had failed to return. She alleged that the police had tried to delay the registration of an FIR in this regard.

Civil Lines SHO Abid Rasheed told The Express Tribune that a complaint had been registered and he had visited the area to locate the missing children. He said they had chanced upon a boy’s shoes in the area that Waqas’s mother had recognised as being his. Rasheed said the bodies of the deceased were recovered from the drain following the development.

The families and friends of the deceased staged a protest demonstration on Saturday against the children’s death. They said they had reason to believe that the bodies had been thrown in the drain after the children had been molested and killed.

Operations DIG Haider Ashraf said that the children appeared to have died after falling in the drain after visiting the spot.

SHO Rasheed told The Express Tribune later in the evening that an autopsy report had confirmed that the children had died after falling in the drain.   

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2015.