Adviser to the Chief Minister (CM) on Social Welfare Shamim Mumtaz informed the Sindh Assembly on Saturday that more than 900 children went missing in the province in 2017.
Shamim Mumtaz said that the children disappeared for a number of reasons, including kidnapping for ransom and running away from home. She said the police managed to recover 650 of them, the whereabouts of the remaining 250 were still unknown.
The adviser shared these figures in the house in response to a call attention notice by Nusrat Seher Abbasi, an MPA from the opposition party Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PML-F). The lawmakers were discussing child safety measures in the province in the wake of the shocking rape and murder of a six-year-old girl Zainab in Kasur.
In her call to attention notice, the PML-F lawmaker said that 1,894 children had gone missing in 2017 and she wanted to know what steps the provincial authorities were taking to recover them. However, Shamim disputed the figure and said that 1,894 was the number of children who went missing from across the country in 2017, not just Sindh.
Sharing the numbers for Sindh, Shamim said 231 children were reported missing from Karachi, 103 from Hyderabad, 164 from Sukkur and 311 from Mirpur Khas, while several others went missing from other districts. She added that while 650 of these children had been recovered, efforts were underway by the social welfare department to find the remaining at the earliest.
