PESHAWAR: An Afghan couple has been arrested for abducting and selling a minor girl three years ago from her house in Bannu.
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Police arrested an Afghan couple Asif and his wife Shazia who are a part of an international human trafficking gang during an operation and the man accused of kidnapping a 10-year-old Gulalai, who was seven at the time of her abduction.
According to local police in the Bannu district, the couple who pretended to be the neighbours of 10-year-old Gulalai kept good relations with her mother and the whole family. One day, Shazia asked the mother of Gulalai to accompany her shopping as they were neighbours.
The mother along with her two daughters Gulalai and her four-year-old daughter Fatima agreed to join the couple. They were taken to the Torkham border by the suspects where the gang sold Gulalai in Afghan province Khost while Fatima and their mother were sold in the capital Kabul for only 85,000 Afghanis.
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In 2018, Gulalai’s father named Raees filed an FIR for the disappearance of his wife and two daughters at Domail police station in Bannu. According to him, Gulalai’s mother and sister managed to escape from Kabul in 2019 and returned to Pakistan. However, they did not know the whereabouts of Gulalai.
“After selling three women from Bannu to Afghanistan, the couple kidnapped two Afghan girls from Afghanistan and brought them to Pakistan and forced them to beg in Karachi,” the police revealed.
The couple was arrested in Karachi for the crime and spent 20 months behind bars but soon after their prison term was over, Bannu police arrested them in connection with the abduction of Gulalai and her family.
During the interrogation, it was revealed that Gulalai was sold in Afghanistan. Bannu police recovered the 10-year-old Gulalai from Khost province of the neighbouring country and later handed her over to the Pakistani authorities at the Torkham border.
