British hubby deceives Pakistani wife, abducts child

LONDON: A cheated Pakistani mother is asking women rights defenders for help after her British husband allegedly lied to her and took away their son to Britain and then won the parental custody after telling the court that his in-laws were ‘extremist’ Muslims and had wanted to send his son to a dangerous radical Madrassah.
Afshan Shahzad Mehmood, 29, from Faisalabad, got married in November 2002 over telephone to a UK resident Shahzad Mehmood, 39, in an arranged Islamic marriage but they didn’t solemnise the marriage in civil courts. The couple’s first child Hamza Shehzad was born on 06.11.2006 but he was taken away from her mother by Mehmood after telling her that he was taking Hamza away only for a week to present him before the mayor of London to get her spouse visa process expedited and to sort out the child benefits for the British passport-holder toddler.
In the messy court fight in the high court in London that ensued between the estranged couple, Ms Afshan was able to fight her case with the help of Reunite charity but all her efforts to reunite with her son were dealt a fatal blow when her husband succeeded in portraying her family as fanatic Muslims who wanted to send Hamza to a radical Madrassah in the Punjab.
In the affidavit lodged in the London High Court on 05-02-2010 and seen by The News, the London cab driver stated that he had three children with his first wife Irene De Jesus, they separated in 2005 and divorced on September 2008 but still lived with each other but he never told his Pakistani bride that he was already in a relationship.
In the court account, Shahzad denied that he got married to Afshan in November 2002 and instead maintained that they spoke for the first time in 2005.
Shahzad traveled in October 2007 with his eldest daughter to make an application to the British High Commission for Hamza to be issued with a British passport, which was eventually granted, after a DNA test of the father, on 13th October 2008, after initially refusing it a year earlier. Shahzad had promised to send the child back to his mother in Pakistan after a week but changed his word and started threatening her that he would divorce her because speaking to her over telephone was upsetting their child and that she was a bad influence on the child.
Afshan’s family contacted the police and the British High Commission but they were told that their only option was to go to the court in the UK to seek justice. Mehmood was successful in convincing the court that Hamza lived happily and had “developed a close bond with his siblings and his ex-wife” but Afshan says she is a victim of the system and has been badly let down by it.
Shahzad Mehmood told The News: “This case is closed as far as I am concerned. The court has made a decision in my favour and it’s obvious that I am right. I can prove myself anywhere in the court. Afshan’s family is gold-diggers. They are dragging me through this to grab my property.”
Shahzad Mehmood alleged that Afshan’s brothers had plastered the private details of her children on websites with lurid suggestions and had created accounts on their names. He accepted that he was not able to get the child speak to his mother since winning the court case and added that their child had forgotten Urdu and could only speak English now, as a way of justifying why in violation of the court orders, the child was not being allowed to speak to his Urdu-speaking mother.