PIMS stolen baby case: Minor boy found in Peshawar raises family’s hopes

DNA test performed, result to confirm if abandoned child is the newborn taken from Pims in January.

ISLAMABAD:

A family has found the first rays of hope of getting their child back, more than three months after he was stolen from the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (Pims).

The newborn was stolen from the hospital’s maternal, neonatal and child health department on January 9.

Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital (LRH) had issued an advertisement seeking help in locating the parents of a two-three months old baby, which was abandoned at the hospital by an unidentified woman.

Atiqur Rehman, an uncle of the stolen boy, said that the family went to LRH and found that the child’s facial features and age were similar to his missing nephew. The parents have also undergone DNA tests to determine if the child is theirs.

“It has given us new hope,” said Rehman, adding that the Pims administration has still no action against the officials responsible for the baby theft. An initial inquiry into the incident had found some hospital officials guilty of negligence.

After the baby theft, the abducted child’s parents and other family members sat at a protest camp on the hospital premises for over two months.

LRH spokesperson Jamil Shah said that an unidentified woman came to the hospital on March 26 and asked an attendant to keep watch over the child while she went to the pharmacy to get some medicine, but she never came back.

The attendant informed the hospital administration after waiting for the woman for a little while. The administration then moved the baby to the nursery and informed the police. After, LRH issued a newspaper ad, the hospital administration received a call from Islamabad Police on the same day.

“The hospital has handed over the CCTV footage of the woman and a DNA sample of the child to the Islamabad Police,” Shah said.

The spokesperson said that no other family had approached the hospital so far to claim the baby.

Margalla DSP Ashraf Shah told The Express Tribune that the woman could not be identified due to the grainy image quality. He said the DNA samples had been sent for testing and was hopeful that they will receive “good news” once the test results are issued in 20 days.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 18^th, 2015.