Srinagar, February 22, 2022 (PPI-OT):The India’s National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data has revealed that 627 children have gone missing in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir by 2020. The missing persons include 350 boys and 277 girls. In 2020 alone, 230 children including 167 girls and 63 boys went missing in the territory. The data said that the recovery rate of the missing children in Jammu and Kashmir is a mere 29.2 percent.

The disappearance or missing usually takes place at the hands of Indian troops, police and agencies. There is also an involvement of human trafficking by non-Kashmiri persons including Indian police and military personnel. As per APDP data at least 8000 Kashmiris including young boys were picked up and subjected to disappearance by Indian troops and police personnel in custody.

Hardly has any day passed when the family of Mehran has not remembered the three-and-a-half-year-old boy who went missing outside his home 13 years ago. It is still a mystery how Mehran could just vanish from a place, which is densely populated. “We are broken from inside but we have not lost hope. Someday, he will return. We have a firm belief,” said Shabir Ahmad Kalla, uncle of Mehran.

On May 13, 2008, Mehran went missing just months after he was admitted to Canny Mission School Court Road in Srinagar. The family had filed a missing report with Kral Khud police station on the same day. To date, Mehran remains untraceable despite CBI probing the case.

“We didn’t follow the case in the last few years. We individually went to many places in Kashmir and even New Delhi, but Mehran couldn’t be traced. Now we have left it to God. He will reunite Mehran with his parents,” said Kalla.

Mehran is not an isolated case of missing children in occupied Kashmir. A pall of gloom has descended on a family at Awoora in Kupwara district after eight-year-old Talib Hussain went missing on February 15. Since then the family is working overtime to trace Talib. Majority of missing cases have remained unresolved in the territory.

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