Many People have questioned my sanity for making a month long trip to Lahore and Faisalabad Pakistan in the Punjab district. This article will explain why God has decided to send me. This is an affront to heaven and God intends to shake Pakistan to its core with His raw power and saving grace. I know God will move!
"Child SLAVES FREED"
Important: Many
of you will be able to guess who "Brother David"
is in the below article. If you decide to forward this
to others or talk about it online, we ask you please NOT to identify him or his
work in any way. The slave traders that he helped to expose are from Terrorist
groups with strong links to Al-Qaeda. So please do not mention his real name -
or even your "guesses" at his real name.
-But you can certainly forward it as-is. Thankyou so
much.
THE SUNDAY TIMES, May 21, 2006
"RESCUED – the
-by Marie Colvin.
THE slave traders came for 10-year-old Akash Aziz as
he played cops and robbers in his dusty village in eastern
Akash woke up in a dark room with a bare brick floor
and no windows. The heat was suffocating. As he languished there over the next
month, 19 other panic-stricken boys were thrown into the room with him. The
children, all Christians, had fallen into the hands of Gul Khan, a wealthy
Islamic militant and leading member of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD), a group linked to
the Al-Qaeda terrorist network.
Khan lives near
This is the story of the misery that Akash and his
friends, aged six to 12, endured in captivity; of their rescue by Christian
missionaries who bought their freedom and tried to expose the kidnappers; and
of the children’s moving reunions with their loved ones who had believed they
were dead. Last week I had the privilege of taking six of the boys home to
their families, including Akash. The astonishment of mothers and fathers who
had given up hope and the fervent, tearful embraces made these some of the most
intensely emotional scenes I have witnessed. That joy was a long time coming.
On the first day after his abduction, Akash was left
in no doubt about the brutality of the regime he would endure. “I drank from a
glass of water and one of the kidnappers pushed me so hard I fell on the glass
and it broke in my hands,” he said. His slender fingers still bear the scars.
No more glass for him, he was told: he was fit to drink only from a tin cup.
The boys were ordered not to talk, pray or play. Five of them were playing a
Pakistani equivalent of scissors, paper, stone one day when the guards burst in
and beat them savagely on their backs and heads. On another occasion Akash was
repeatedly struck by guards yelling “What is in your house?” “I kept telling them,
‘We have nothing’,” he said anxiously.
“I was so afraid they would go back and rob my father
and mother.”
It is painful to imagine blows raining down on the
ribs of so slight a figure.
The guards mostly sat outside playing cards, shaded
from the
116 F heat by a tree. But the boys were allowed out of
their room only to use a filthy hole-in-the-ground lavatory. All they could see
were high walls around the two-room building that was their prison.
The other room was always locked. The children were
fed once a day on chapatis and dhal, but never enough. Akash slept huddled
against the others on the floor and woke each morning a little more resigned to
his fate. “We just sat around the walls thinking,” Akash said. “We were
remembering our homes and our mothers and fathers and hoping someone would
rescue us. But nobody came.”
I first saw Akash in a photograph among those of 20
boys who were being touted for sale in
Unbeknown to Akash, a Pakistani Christian missionary
and an American evangelist who runs a tiny charity called Help Pakistani
Children had seen the boys’ photographs and taken up their cause.
Neither man is willing to be identified today for fear
of the consequences. An elaborate sting was conceived. The Pakistani missionary
would pose as a
The two men would also collect evidence that could be
used in any police action against the kidnappers. “We knew if we just purchased
the boys, the slavers would just restock. We would be fuelling the slave
trade,” said the American evangelist, who asked to be referred to as “Brother
David”. They had no idea how hazardous their enterprise was until Amir used
some black market contacts to engineer a meeting with Khan and discovered his
links to the JUD. “We realised we were out of our depth,” Brother David said
ruefully. But they persevered — and prayed a good deal.
Amir played his part well. Within a week he had bought
three of the boys for $5,000 (£2,650) and put down a $2,500 deposit on the
17 others, including Akash. The first three were
handed over on a
he could earn more if he sold them for their organs,
he claimed.
Brother David went home to
He enlisted police officers who insisted that the
eventual transaction be recorded with a secret camera so that the evidence
against Khan would be irrefutable.
Twelve days ago Amir received a call from Khan
summoning him to a meeting at a crossroads on a dirt road near the JUD’s
Muridke camp. There was no cover here, just newly harvested wheat fields and
water buffalo wallowing in a pond. Six policemen dressed as laborers with the
intention of alerting colleagues in cars concealed a mile away to arrest Khan
once the cash had been exchanged for the children. Amir and a young assistant
waited for an hour at the crossroads before one of Khan’s men walked up and
directed him to another location. The police had been wrong-footed. Amir
finally found his quarry under a large, shady tree where he was sitting on a
rope bed while an acolyte massaged his shoulders.
“You have the money?” Khan asked. When Amir handed him
the $28,500 cash in a black knapsack, he examined it briskly. Then, without
explanation, he broke his promise to hand over the boys there and then. “I will
check the dollars are real first,” he said. “If your dollars are good, you will
get the children.” A second blow followed. Khan announced that he was going to
take Amir’s assistant as hostage. If the money was real, he said, the children
would be delivered in two hours. If it was counterfeit, the hostage would not
be seen again. It was a heart-stopping moment, not least because the young man
posing as Amir’s bag carrier had hidden the secret camera under his shirt. Amir
motioned him to the back of his car as if to retrieve something from the boot,
and ripped the camera from his body. The hostage was blindfolded and driven to
a building where he was held alone in a room. “I was so praying that your money
was good,” he later told Amir. Another anxious wait ensued. The police were off
the scene and the two hours passed with no word from the kidnappers. Nor was
there any news the next day.
Finally, a call came through from Amir’s assistant in
the dead of night. He had just been dropped off by the side of a road 15
minutes’ drive from JUD headquarters with the remaining 17 boys.
They were afraid but alive, he declared. They were
being taken to a shack nearby. I drove there immediately and found Akash asleep
on a plastic mat surrounded by his 16 friends. Their thin limbs were sprawled
and their bodies curled against each other for comfort.
One boy gripped the sleeve of another as he slept.
They stank of urine.
As the children
awoke, the bewilderment showed in their eyes. The first task of the
missionaries was to reassure them but few seemed to believe Brother David when
he said: “We will protect you. We will take you home to your mothers and
fathers.
The bad men who took you are gone.” Not one boy
smiled. It had been too long since they had dared to hope. Yet after a cold
wash under an outdoor tap and a change into fresh clothes, preparations began
for the first of the long car journeys back to their homes in remote
As the boys gradually warmed to their liberators, they
talked a little about their ordeal. Asif Anjed, 8, one of the smallest, had the
biggest personality. But his concept of
time was so childish that when I asked him how long it had been since he
had seen his parents, he thought hard for a moment and said: “Six or seven years.” It had been five
months.
Asif had retained a sense of outrage from the moment
of his abduction. “They put me in a bag!”
he kept saying indignantly. He picked out a bright orange T-shirt
because he liked its bear logo, the symbol of a football team in
Asif seemed to have few memories of home. “My friend
was Bilal,”
he said. He grew quiet when he realised he had
forgotten what his mother looked like. As if exhausted by the effort of trying
to remember, he fell asleep across my lap during the 15-hour drive to his home
in the desert of southern
As we drew near, the garrulous Asif looked solemn,
perhaps not knowing quite what to expect. At a place where fertile green fields
gave way to white desert sands, he pointed to his house at the end of a path
across a stretch of wasteland. His father, Amjed, must have seen him getting
out of the car. He came running out of the house, barely able to believe that
the boy walking hesitantly towards him in plastic sandals was his son. Then he
flung out his arms, scooped up Asif and squeezed him against his chest. Asif’s
mother, Gazzala, came bustling down the path as fast as she could in her
flowered salwar kameez, dragging his younger sister, Neha, by the hand. She
collapsed on her knees in front of Asif, her only other child, weeping and
clutching him to her, the long months of anguish etched into the lines on her
face. Like any other boy of his age, Asif seemed embarrassed by these extreme
displays of emotion, glowering as his mother clung to him for longer than he
would have liked.
Both parents remembered every detail of the day their
boy had failed to return home from school. Asif’s father manages a small
chicken farm and usually collects him on a bicycle for the 3km ride. He still
cannot forgive himself for staying home to work that day. When Asif did not
appear his father started a frantic search, stopping strangers on his bicycle
to ask, “Have you seen my little boy?” In common with other families, Asif’s
did not go to the police. “The police will only take interest if they are paid
and we have nothing,” Amjed said. “We thought someone had killed him,”
his mother added, the tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I couldn’t stop imagining that maybe they had broken his arms and legs.” As
the reality sank in, both parents began to smile. They looked at Asif in shock
as he repeated his customary line —“they put me in a bag” — but were soon
planning a family feast to celebrate. “It’s a miracle!” Amjed said.
Khan would also be shocked if he knew that his
captives had not been sold into slavery. Their rescuers fear retribution and
are also worried because the exposure of Khan has implications for the way religious
extremist groups are treated in
There can be no denying Khan’s connections with the
JUD. After he collected his $28,500, he was seen driving directly into its
headquarters. Brother David and Amir are ready to present their dossier of
evidence, including the secret tape of Khan taking the money for the boys. In
almost any other country, an investigation into Khan and his work for the JUD
would be automatic. It is not so simple in
Brother David said. “I pray that a public outcry will
arise in
Akash, the first boy to be returned to his family,
constitutes the strongest possible case for an end to child trafficking. For
the first few hours of the journey to his village, Akash sat on the edge of the
back seat next to me. He rested his hands on the front seats, gazing out
through the windscreen, answering any question with a monosyllable and flexing
his fingers over and over again. He recalled that his best friend was called
Rashed — they played cricket together — but he could not remember the name of
his school.
He shook as we approached his village. I thought he
would collapse. Then came a quiet, uplifting moment that brought tears to my
eyes. The driver stopped by a canal to ask directions.
Taking the initiative for the first time, Akash
tentatively raised his arm, pointing down a narrow dirt road running with
sewage. He had not even reached the door of his house before his grandmother,
wrapped in a colourful shawl, engulfed him in an embrace in the dirt alley
outside, her face contorted with delight. Akash’s mother was so strangely
impassive that it made me angry until I realized she was too shocked to take in
the fact that the son she had thought was dead was snuggling up to her.
Finally, she hugged him, kissing him over and over again on the top of his
head. “We were hopeless,” she said. “His father searched and searched. We
prayed. But we thought he was gone.”
Akash had another surprise waiting for him at home: a
two-month- old brother he had never seen. Home at last, resting against his
mother, he smiled broadly for the first time and, just a few hours after
getting into a car for the first time, declared his ambition to become a pilot.
~Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
To find out more, please go to Brother David's
website- http://www.helppakistanchildren.org/