A 12-year-old Christian girl reunited with her parents last week after she was abducted two months prior by a Muslim neighbor who forcibly converted her to Islam and coerced her into marrying him, sources said.
Saba Shafique was abducted by Muhammad Ali, 35, from outside her home in the Walton Model Colony No. 2 neighborhood of Lahore Cantonment, Punjab Province on Jan. 5, the sources said. Ali first took her to Sialkot city in Punjab where he prepared a fake religious conversion and marriage certificate on Jan. 8 and then moved her to Shaheed Benazirabad city, formerly known as Nawabshah, in Sindh Province, rights advocates said.
Lahore Police with help from Sindh Police on Wednesday (March 5) raided an outhouse in a village of Shaheed Benazirabad, recovered Saba and arrested Ali, the sources said. Officers brought her back to Lahore the next day.
“I cannot express my joy when I hugged Saba after so many days,” her mother, Rakhil Shafique, told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “Her father and I haven’t been able to sleep properly all this time, but now we will finally take rest.”
Saba said Ali used to tell her that he liked her very much and would keep her happy.
“On the day he took me from my home, he asked me to accompany him to the bazaar where he would buy me presents,” she told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “After some time, I asked him to take me back home as my parents would be worried about me, but he snubbed me and forced me to sit on a bus.”
She said she had no idea he was taking her another city, Sialkot, where Ali had arranged for a cleric to fabricate a false religious conversion certificate and conduct a sham Islamic marriage that stated her age as 18 years.
“Ali then forced me to record a video saying that I had converted to Islam and married him of my free will,” said Saba, a Catholic. “I was also forced to state that I’m 18 years old, and that my parents should not take any action against us.”
After a few days in Sialkot, Ali took Saba to a relative’s village in Shaheed Benazirabad District , Sindh Province, fearing police would act on the complaint of her father, Shafique Masih. Ali filed a petition in the Hyderabad Sessions Court on behalf of Saba seeking legal protection for the so-called marriage, a common tactic perpetrators use to prevent families from reclaiming kidnapped daughters.
“During the time I was there, Ali did bad things with me which numbed my mind and body,” she said. “He also beat me whenever I used to cry for my parents and told him that I wanted to go back home. I was kept locked in a room most of the time.”
Saba said she was relieved when she saw her parents after the police broke open the door of the room in the early morning raid.
“I was very happy to see them – I had already started regretting going with Ali without my parents’ knowledge, and I don’t want to cause them any worry in future,” she added.
Her mother said she had no idea that their neighbor had any bad intention toward Saba.
“His behavior with our children was such that we never suspected what was going on in his mind,” Rakhil Shafique said.
Her recovery was made possible with support from Christian paralegal organization HARDS Pakistan, which obtained permission for the interprovincial police action.
“We are grateful to the senior leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party, which is in government in the Sindh Province, for facilitating the recovery of the minor Christian girl,” Sohail Habil, executive director of HARDS Pakistan, told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News.
Habil said police had initially registered an abduction case against Ali, but that the group’s legal team would now seek the additional charges related to rape, child marriage and other crimes.
Saba was expected to retract her earlier statements in court and describe how Ali enticed her to go with him and then forcibly converted and married her, he said.
Christian rights activist Napolean Qayyum, who travelled with the police team to Shaheed Benazirabad to recover Saba, said Ali had initially denied sexually exploiting her, claiming he was “impotent.”
“However, he admitted to his crime during police interrogation,” Qayyum said. “He is now in the custody of the Lahore police and will face the consequences.”
Urging church leaders to use their influence to raise awareness about child abduction and forcible conversion/marriage, Qayyum said that it was important to teach children how predators like Ali employ various tactics to lure victims from their homes.
“In many cases, young girls are trapped on false pretexts of love and giving them gifts, and then they are emotionally blackmailed to go with the perpetrators,” he said. “It is abduction nonetheless, because the innocent victims are not aware of the underlying motives of such predators.”
Typically kidnapped girls in Pakistan, some as young as 10, are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and raped under cover of Islamic “marriages” and are then pressured to record false statements in favor of the kidnappers, rights advocates say. Judges routinely ignore documentary evidence related to the children’s ages, handing them back to kidnappers as their “legal wives.”
Recorded cases of abduction and forced conversion numbered 136 in 2023, the highest annual total ever, according to the Center for Social Justice. Among these, 110 Hindu girls were abducted in Sindh Province and 26 Christian girls in Punjab Province. A majority of incidents took place in Sindh, where 77 percent of the abducted females were minors under the age of 18, according to the center.
Unofficial sources suggest that forced religious conversions linked to forced marriages affect as many as 1,000 girls belonging to religious minorities annually.
Pakistan ranked eighth on Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List of the most difficult places to be a Christian.
