Interior ministry told to help recover Dua Zehra

The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Tuesday directed the federal interior secretary to issue directions to all the relevant law enforcement agencies to extend cooperation with the Sindh police for the recovery of Dua Zehra, an alleged underage girl who went missing from Karachi last month and later found to have married a man in Punjab.

Hearing a petition for the recovery of Dua and cancellation of her marriage under the Sindh Child Marriage Restraint Act filed by her father, a division bench of the SHC headed by Justice Mohammad Iqbal Kalhoro asked the Sindh police chief why the missing girl had not been traced and produced despite court directions.

The IGP submitted that Dua and her spouse were recently located in Balakot, Mansehra, but when police teams went to Balakot, the couple had already left and now their location had been traced in Azad Kashmir.

The IGP and Criminal Investigation Agency DIG also filed a progress report with regard to the recovery of Dua. The high court observed that despite repeated directions of the court, no compliance had been made out and as per the mobile phone signals of the girl’s ‘spouse’, the police chased them sometime in Punjab and sometime in KP as well as Azad Kashmir.

The IGP undertook that the girl would be traced within one week and produced before court for further proceedings. The SHC issued notices to the federal interior secretary with a direction to tell all the concerned law enforcement agencies to extend cooperation to the Sindh police for the recovery of Dua. The bench observed that the IGP would also be at liberty to seek assistance in this matter from any law enforcement agencies duly skilled in espionage. The high court directed the Sindh IGP to produce the girl by May 30.