Pakistan: A Traffic of Children Hidden Behind the Assassination of the Young Shazia
There is a whole network of sale, traffic and slavery of minors behind the case of Shazia, the young Catholic girl who was raped and killed by the Moslem lawyer of Lahore – 4th city, in the north of Pakistan – where she worked as a servant (see DICI n° 210). According to Catholic sources quoted by the agency Fides, Shazia's sad case has led inspectors to the discovery of a veritable traffic of minors: the children are torn from poor families, often Christian, under the pretext that they will be thus led to a worthy life in the homes of the middle classes; they are then sold to these bourgeois families, and become “little slaves”, at the mercy of their masters, with no freedom and living practically in escrow.
This was exactly the case for Shazia. Before Christmas, her parents, worried by their daughter's silence, went to her master ask for news, but were not even received. It was only on January 21 that the lawyer came forward to give them the lifeless body of the little twelve-year-old girl, claiming that she “had fallen down the stairs” and offering 20,000 rupees (175 euros) for the funeral and their silence.
Although the affair caused much emotion in Pakistan, and the president of the country even made an assistance available to the family, the macabre routine seems today to have regained its rights, since the presumed murderer is already free. In the time that remains until the trial, which is being prepared under death threats against the defense of the victim’s parents, the vicar general of the Catholic archdiocese of Lahore, Fr. Andrew Nisari, laments that “justice has been taken hostage in Pakistan. It is distressing to see that those whose responsibility it is to ensure the defense of the persons deserving justice are united to prove innocent one of their own.”
(Sources: apic/fides/eda – DICI n°212, March 20, 2010)
