The Missing Girls of Punjab: Filed Away & Forgotten

A 16-year-old girl went missing in Faisalabad in 2024. For two years, her mother, Sadia Bibi, waited for the police to find her. When they failed, she turned to the Lahore High Court.

On 6 October this year, the Lahore High Court’s Chief Justice Aalia Neelum ordered Punjab’s Inspector General of Police Rao Abdul Karim to recover the girl and produce her in court the next day. She demanded to know why, despite repeated assurances to the family, the police had failed to trace her. Her intervention worked; on 7 October, the police produced the girl before the court.

Sadia’s case is remarkable in how familiar it is: a girl goes missing, the state machinery stirs only when a court intervenes, but after much delay -- Sadia had to wait two years for her daughter to be found. And another mother, Salma Bibi, waited four years to learn of her missing daughter’s fate.

Salma’s daughter disappeared in 2022. Like Sadia, Salma turned to the LHC after police failed to find her. On 4 March 2026, the court ordered the Punjab police chief to recover the girl by 24 March. Police returned with a grim conclusion: she had been murdered by the son-in-law of the owner of the house where she had worked. They said the suspect had confessed to the crime. Her body, however, has yet to be found.

Cases involving missing girls and women are often marred by weaknesses in police investigations, beginning with the registration of the FIR and persisting throughout the investigative process – such as delays in recording complaints and witness statements, poor collection and preservation of evidence, failure to pursue leads, inadequate coordination between agencies, and incomplete police reports. “In missing girls and women’s cases, delays can also mean lost evidence, fading witness memories and fewer chances of tracing the person,” says Imtiaz Ahmed Somro, who is the legal aid coordinator at Sahil, a prominent non-profit organization in Pakistan that works on child protection.

He adds that such cases require compliance with Section 173 Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898, which provides the statutory framework for the submission of police reports upon completion of an investigation. “Under this section, if an investigation is not completed within 14 days of the registration of the FIR, the police must submit an interim report to the magistrate through the prosecutor within the following three days. In practice, however, investigations take up to six months, and in cases such as those of the daughters of Sadia and Salma, they have taken years to resolve.”

Once a case reaches court, he adds, judicial oversight must ensure that investigations are thorough, lawful and timely — and that “police performance is measured by the quality of the work, not simply the number of cases closed.”

Crucially, beyond exposing weaknesses in police investigations, the two cases of Salma and Sadia brought before the LHC point to the scale of the problem. Punjab police told the court during a hearing on Salma’s petition on 22 April 2026 that 105,244 abduction cases involving women had been registered between 2021 and 2025. The report stated that 70,773 cases were registered under Section 365-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, which criminalises the kidnapping or abduction of a woman with the intent to compel her to marry against her will or to force her into illicit sexual intercourse, and 34,471 under Section 496-A, which criminalises enticing, concealing or detaining a woman with the intent that she have illicit sexual intercourse.

Further, the LHC was told that 80,706 cases were dismissed based on the statements of the victims, while challans in 20,613 cases were submitted to the courts. Back then, the court was informed, 3,864 cases were under investigation.

Updating the same information on 1 June, 2026, DIG Investigation Shoaib Janbaz, representing the IGP, said in the court that 1,405 girls and women had been recovered, while 1,853 remained untraced. He also said that about 80 percent of those recovered had married of their own choice, while another 15 percent had returned home voluntarily.

Five months on, while reporting on the figures of the missing females, Punjab IGP Rao Abdul Karim said in the court of Justice Aalia Neelum on 6 October, 2026, during proceedings on Sadia’s petition, that more than 500 cases of missing girls remained pending in the province.

The figures police have presented to the courts suggest that the number of missing girls in Punjab is falling rapidly. This may make police officials puff out their chests, but, legal experts say, they reveal little about the quality of investigations, which are often flawed, with delayed recoveries and families forced to turn to the courts to secure police action.

Individual cases expose the lapses. In April 2024, Dawn reported that police in Pakpattan had declared a four-year-old girl murdered after she disappeared in December 2021. The girl returned home alive more than two years later, exposing the grave consequences of an investigation that had reached a false conclusion.

Nida Aly, a human rights advocate associated with the Asma Jahangir Legal Aid Cell, says it is difficult to establish whether a decline in reported cases represents genuine progress because of significant gaps in practice when seeking legal remedies for women through the courts and compiling independent data. “Information held by the police, prosecution services and civil society organisations is often fragmented, with no consolidated system through which cases can be tracked from the initial complaint to investigation, recovery and final resolution.”

The critical question, therefore, is not simply why the numbers have fallen. It is how many girls have actually been found, how many cases have been conclusively resolved, how many remain genuinely untraced, and what action has been taken in each case.

Aly mentions that Punjab has invested considerably in surveillance infrastructure, including safe city cameras and other technological resources available to law enforcement. “These systems should, where relevant and subject to lawful access, assist investigators in tracing the movements of missing persons and identifying leads.”

She says that the fact that so many cases reportedly remain unresolved raises concerns about whether these resources are being used effectively and whether investigations are sufficiently prompt, thorough and victim-centred. However, she thinks, technology alone cannot solve these cases. “It must be supported by proper investigative techniques, coordination between agencies, timely follow-up and accountability.”

Clearly, resolving cases of missing girls requires reform at every stage, from the initial complaint to the completion of the investigation and presentation of the case before the court. Only then will Punjab deliver timely justice and build a more transparent, accountable and effective criminal justice system.