Two particularly distressing cases involving the murders of young children have taken place in Karachi, and in the space of less than a month. Both cases are shocking and are not the usual case of street crime gone wrong, which at times ends in the killing of a citizen who resisted the mugging, or even a target killing, which Karachi has seen quite a lot of. Both relate to a broken home – where the father and mother are not living together –, in both cases they had become divorced, and there were also custody issues. In both cases, the parents were fighting over the custody of the young children; additionally, in both cases, the children were under the age of ten, and there was a sister and a brother in each family.

The first such case happened right at the beginning of August when police reported a man in his forties to have jumped into the sea near Karachi’s Seaview beach, and his two children, both under the age of ten, were with him. Over the next 24 hours, the man’s body and those of his daughter and son were eventually found a couple of kilometres towards Karachi’s port area. Further investigation by the police revealed that the man had recently lost custody of the two children to his ex-wife.........

© The Friday Times