World News | Two Hindu Girls Abducted in Pakistan's Sindh Province

Karachi, Oct 19 (PTI) Two teenage Hindu girls have allegedly been abducted in Pakistan's Sindh province, prompting their mother to stage a protest on Wednesday after police purportedly refused to register an FIR about the incident, which is the latest in a string of such atrocities against members of the minority community in the country.

The mother claimed the incident occurred last week in the Salah Pat area near Sukkur when they were returning home.

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She said that three men forcibly took away her daughters -who are 17 and 18 years old - and also pushed and hit her when she tried to stop them.

The helpless mother on Wednesday protested against the refusal of the police to register a first information report about the incident.

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“I have named the masked men who abducted my daughters but the police are doing nothing. I appeal to the court to do something and give me back my daughters,” she said.

The abduction and forcible conversion of young Hindu girls have become a major problem in the interior of Sindh province which has a large Hindu population in Thar, Umerkot, Mirpurkhas, Ghotki and Khairpur areas. Most of the Hindu community members are labourers.

Pakistan's Sindh government this month ordered a high-level probe into reports of the abduction of a 14-year-old Hindu girl from the city of Hyderabad in Sindh province.

Last month, a woman and two teenage girls belonging to the Hindu community were kidnapped with two of them forcibly converted to Islam and married to Muslim men.

On July 16, 2019, the issue of abducting and forcibly converting Hindu girls in various districts of Sindh province was taken up in the Sindh Assembly, where a resolution was debated and unanimously passed after it was modified over objections of certain lawmakers that it should not be restricted to Hindu girls only.

But the bill which criminalised forcible religious conversions was later rejected in the assembly. A similar bill was again proposed but rejected last year.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)