AFGHANISTAN: MYSTERY SURROUNDS DEATH OF TWO YOUNG CHILDREN WHO WERE REPORTEDLY ABDUCTED AND THEN KILLED IN SEPERATE INCIDENTS IN KABUL

Record ID: 275487

  • Title: AFGHANISTAN: MYSTERY SURROUNDS DEATH OF TWO YOUNG CHILDREN WHO WERE REPORTEDLY ABDUCTED AND THEN KILLED IN SEPERATE INCIDENTS IN KABUL
  • Date: 8th December 2001
  • Summary: KABUL, AFGHANISTAN (DECEMBER 8, 2001 AND RECENT) (REUTERS) GV: KABUL DISTRICT LV/SCU/CU/SV: KITES FLYING; CHILDREN FLYING KITES (4 SHOTS) VARIOUS: YOUNG GIRL WORKING IN MARKET; YOUNG BOY BUYING MEAT IN MARKET; YOUNG BOY PRACTISING FIRING AN AIRGUN IN MARKET; YOUNG BOY PUSHING FRUIT TROLLEY NEAR MARKET AREA (7 SHOTS) LV: MARKET AREA/ BUILDINGS CU/SV/SCU: (SOUNDBITE) (Dari)
  • Embargoed: 23rd December 2001 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
  • Country: Afghanistan
  • Reuters ID: LVA1NLSDEZ4QWSNFRGDOT6WXBLL4
  • Story Text: In the Afghan capital Kabul, mystery surrounds the death of two young children, who were reportedly abducted and then killed in separate incidents.
    No one seems to know who abducted Roma and Maqbula, nor why they were killed in a manner so brutal that it stood out in a city where war and disease have stacked the odds on the side of early death.
    But whoever snatched and murdered the two little Afghan girls, both aged four and killed some two years apart, took out their eyes and, in Roma's case, her kidneys, according to their families.
    And in doing so, the mystery killers spread fear through Kabul that kidnappers trafficking in human organs were on the prowl when the city was under the control of the Taliban.
    Roma went missing four months ago while playing in the street outside her home in the District Nine area close to downtown Kabul at around 10am.
    Five nights later, a pick-up truck with its headlights switched off drove past the house and dumped the body on the street, said Najibullah, a 35-year-old relative of the girl.
    "The eyes were missing and there were no kidneys. We couldn't look more closely to see what else was missing," said Najibullah. The girl's abdomen appeared to have been cut open and then stitched up with surgical thread, he said.
    Unconfirmed reports, spread by local rumour and fear in this devastated city, speak of many more children who may have met the same, grisly fate.
    In late August, Taliban-controlled radio reported that three women and a man disguised in a burqa, the head-to-toe Muslim veil that the strict Islamic militia made women wear in public, had been arrested for running a child abduction ring.
    Short on specifics, the report said the gang had admitted to having kidnapped 60 children in Kabul over the previous two months, drugged them and sent them abroad in return for one billion afghanis ($16,500 dollars at the time) per child.
    "We have no precise information yet as to how and for what purpose the abducted children were being taken beyond the Afghan border," the report said.
    Residents of Kabul say they would scare their children into staying off the streets by telling them the "man in the burqa" would get them unless they hurried home.
    Few, however, are inclined to believe the Taliban radio report. They question why no public execution was ever staged for the perpetrators of so heinous a crime and suspect the report was concocted to assuage public concern.
    In early September, the Northern Alliance, in control of Kabul since last month's Taliban retreat, alleged several children in Kabul had been killed by a gang of Pakistani organ traffickers working with a special Taliban unit.
    That too is dubious.
    Officials at the Afghan interior ministry, police headquarters and local hospitals all said they had heard the rumours of organ trafficking but seen no evidence to prove that it took place.
    Western doctors working in Kabul said conditions in the city were so primitive that it would be virtually impossible to preserve human body parts, even eyes for cornea transplants, long enough to be of use in surgery abroad.
    "I suppose it could have been the work of some mad man and if that's the case, it could happen in Milan," said Dr Gino Strada, an Italian who heads a team of surgeons at a foreign- funded hospital in Kabul for civilian war victims.
    All that is of little consolation to the families of Roma and Maqbula, who complain that the killings were never properly investigated by the Taliban and remain a mystery.
    "They took a statement from my husband saying he did not have any enemies and never came back," said Maqbula's mother, Madina.
    A malnourished, illiterate woman who is unsure of her own age, she recounted how Maqbula, one of her eight children, went out to play one day with a piece of bread in her hand.
    Hours later, her body was found beneath a boulder on a barren hillside near the poor settlement on the outskirts of Kabul where the family has lived since they fled from fighting on the Shomali Plain north of the city in 1996.
    "When the people got there her trousers were around her neck and she had been strangled," said Maqbula, crouching in a corner of her destitute shelter, tears welling in her eyes.
    "Her eyes were cut out and her head had been smashed in,"
    she said.
    Maqbula's body now rests by the roadside at the edge of a cemetery. A wooden stick and a tattered flag mark the spot.
    "I have nothing to remember her by," said Madina. She thinks hard when asked when all this happened and settles on five years ago in the spring. Local elders said she was confused and that Maqbula had been killed two years ago.
    "We know of nine cases in different parts of the city,"
    said Mohammad Kabir, 70, one of the elders in the Nawabad district of northern Kabul where Madina and her family live.
    "The eyes were taken, the kidneys were taken but no one has investigated," he said. "Not a single clue has emerged as to who did it and why."
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2015. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register