FAISALABAD: A UK national’s struggle for the recovery of his kidnapped son has met a tragic end after a DNA report confirmed that an ‘unclaimed body’ buried in a Gojra graveyard is of his child.

The family will proceed to Gojra on Friday (today) for exhumation of the body to bring it back to Faisalabad for burial with religious rites.

Four-year-old Shehryar Iftikhar was kidnapped from Asim Town, D Type Colony, on Aug 21 last when he was playing outside the house of his grandfather. The family did not receive any call for ransom.

Iftikhar Ahmad told Dawn that all his efforts including entreaties to the senior police officers for safe recovery of his son proved futile. He said the police could have saved the life of the child with a bit of effort but most officers took the case casually.

“Although samples of the unclaimed body had been sent to the lab for DNA, I did not stop searching for my son. After its report, I have lost all hopes,” said a dejected father who learnt through the report that Shehryar had been strangled.

Further criticising the police, Iftikhar said immediately after the kidnapping, the family informed the police that Shehroze, who belongs to a family having a record of heinous crimes, had kidnapped Shehryar and some people were witness to the kidnap.

Instead of grilling Shehroze, he said, the police wasted time by “investigating my family.” And without any concrete evidence, the police insisted “my wife seems to be involved in the kidnap of Shehryar.” The police also obtained the call record of my wife’s mobile phone but did not find anything against her, he said.

Iftikhar has been settled in the UK since 1986 and his wife Irum is a manager at a private bank in Faisalabad. He returned to Pakistan just two days after the news about his son’s kidnap.

The police officers were saying Shehryar was killed within a few hours of his kidnap, he said while deploring that they left the all-important case of tracing the child to their subordinates. He alleged that Inspector Arif Wattoo, first investigation officer of the case, had facilitated the culprits by ignoring the family’s pleas.

He said Regional Police Officer Ahsan Tufail had formed a five-member team — Civil Lines DSP Mohammad Usman, Inspector Mohammad Yasir, sub-inspectors Shahid Sarwar and Mohammad Farooq and ASI Mohammad Imran — to recover Shehryar. The police came to the conclusion that Shehryar had been killed by the kidnappers, he said.

Passersby spotted the body of Shehryar floating in the canal in Gojra and informed the police who buried the child.

Imran Abbas, a neighbour, claimed that the police had summoned Iftikhar many times and some area people accompanied him. Instead of giving sympathetic hearing to Iftikhar, he said, the police officers would made all the people wait for hours outside their offices even during night hours.

A police officer said Shehryar was killed in Gojra when the kidnappers came to know that the family had identified them. The child’s body was found in canal after a few days, he added.