November 16, 2025
By Xari Jalil
LAHORE
Shahbaz Masih wears a black tee shirt with the word ‘HOPE’ written on it in white. But one look at him and his family shows that hope is nowhere to be found. Instead, desperation and misery are what mark their faces.
Three of his younger children sit together on a charpoy. His eldest son, Anther, has gone to attend his classes. Only his older daughter Maria is missing. In fact she has been missing since the past 4 months now; no one knows where she is.
“We were woken up by Anther one morning at around five a.m,” says Shahbaz Masih, a simple man, who works as a driver. “He told us that Maria was not in her bed and that he had checked everywhere but she was nowhere to be found. We went outside at once, and began calling out her name, and went upto the main road looking for her, but there was no trace of her.”
As the day went on, Shahbaz’s suspicions went to a man he knew since some time – possibly the only outsider who had seen his family. Sheheryar Ahmad was a mechanic and they had met at a third place during work. Ahmad was taking a break and they had sat together and had tea. Slowly they began to meet more and a friendship formed. They shared tea, sometimes a paan. Ahmad called Shahbaz’s wife his ‘sister’; Shahbaz began to trust him.
While his little one room house had no space to entertain any guests, Ahmad often came to visit and they used to sit outside with him and they chatted sometimes even till late at night. It was not surprising then that he saw Shahbaz’s children come and go, as they sat outside his house.
Perhaps one of them had also been Maria.
“My suspicions rose when after Maria went missing, I called him saying that I needed his help and that he must come soon to help me out,” relates Shahbaz. “But Sheheryar began to act strange, as if he was not telling me something. He was being very vague about his whereabouts and kept saying he would be with me in some time, that it might take three or four hours. Those three or four hours have now turned into four months. That day I waited for him till evening, giving him the benefit of doubt, hoping that I was wrong about him. But eventually I was sure she was with him.”
Seeing there was no one else to help them, Shahbaz says he sought his employer’s help who helped him contact a police officer. That police officer then redirected him to the Nawab Town police station, whose jurisdiction it was.
The rest he has been handling on his own, and in vain.
Police indifference & legal issues
“It took three days for the police to file a first information report (FIR),” he says. “I went again and again, begging and pleading with them, telling them my daughter was missing that they must help. But the police coldly brushed me off. When they eventually filed the application on July 29 (2025), it was against unknown persons. I had to tell them the name of the individuals involved and then they added those to the FIR.”
But by July 31, a magistrate’s court recorded a statement by Maria, allegedly of her own free will, saying that she had converted to Islam and married Ahmad. The court accepted the statement and Maria’s custody was given to Ahmad, the man her parents kept insisting had abducted her. The fact that her parents have government documents which specify Maria’s date of birth as 2012, shows that she was indeed a minor. However, the nikahnamah states that the bride’s (Maria) date of birth is 01-02-2007, making her exactly 18 years old.
At the same time, the marriage certificate shows a signature and thumbprint by the bridegroom (Sheheryar Ahmad), but no signature or thumbprint by the bride.
“This nikahnamah is invalid, it is fake,” says Shahbaz. “How can this be legal? She has not even signed it. She is about to turn 13 – she’s just a child – she would not know these things. This man is so much older than her. He is making her do everything. I know that he must have raped her, and the police is doing nothing except seeing where the money is coming from – they have malafide intent.”
Maria’s marriage certificate violates the Punjab Child Marriage Restraint Act, which clearly states that girls under 16 cannot marry. Her family wants Maria back and more than that they want to see the man who abducted her punished severely for abducting a child, contracting a fake marriage with her and in all possibility for her rape.
But the social attitude is a problem here. When President Asif Ali Zardari signed a landmark bill on May 29, setting the minimum marriage age at 18 for both girls and boys in the Islamabad Capital Territory, the move was criticized by the religious circles. The Council of Islamic Ideology went so far as to oppose labelling under-18 marriages as rape.
A similar bill to raise the minimum age to 18 has been lying in the Punjab Assembly since April 25, 2024. In Punjab today, the minimum age for girls remains 16. In maria’s case, however the act violates even this law.
However surprisingly the police has filed the FIR under Section 363 – kidnapping/abduction of a minor. Usually in cases of forced conversions – and where commonly the abducted girl is a minor – the case is simply filed under “abduction of adult”. The police often do not recognize that the girl is a minor which causes complications.
Meanwhile the Christian Marriage (Amendment) Act 2024 has also raised the marriageable age to 18 for Christians. But in cases of forced conversion, when a minor is pressured to convert from Christianity to Islam, she ends up falling under different rules.
Speaking to Voicepk, Joseph Janssen dilated on the issue. Janssen is a human rights activist who speaks against forced conversions, the abduction and marriage of minor girls from minority communities in Pakistan.
“It is disturbing and devastating to witness the ongoing abduction, rape, forced conversion to Islam, and child marriage of Christian minor girls in Pakistan,” he stressed. “These are not mere crimes—they are acts of terror and barbarism committed against the weakest and most innocent members of society. Even more alarming is that these atrocities continue under the watch of state actors. Every time a young Christian girl is dragged from her home, violated, and forced into marriage in the name of religion, Pakistan’s justice system collapses, and humanity itself is disgraced. The police who refuse to act, the courts that fail to protect victims, and the politicians who remain silent—they are all complicit in this evil.”
Janssen expresses his anger at the situation.
“Enough is enough! No religion, no law, and no culture can justify the destruction of a child’s life.” He emphasizes that these criminals and their protectors must be exposed, prosecuted, and punished without mercy. “We are fully committed to bringing Maria back to her parents,” Janssen said.
The troubling dynamics of forced conversion through marriage
A study by the Legal Aid Cell in collaboration with the National Commission of Human Rights shows that Forced Conversion through Marriage (FCM) remains a deeply rooted issue in Pakistan and disproportionately impacts minor girls and women from religious minority communities (RMCs). The minority status of these girls heightens their vulnerability to this type of abuse.
The report explicitly lists the motivations of FCM perpetrators, which validate and strengthen the suspicions that parents such as Shahbaz and Erum Masih have in mind. The report identifies motivations of perpetrators of FCM which include sexual gratification or a a drive for social dominance, and also ideologically motivated sexual grooming. (This provides a formal term for the process Sheheryar Ahmad used—building trust with the family and observing Maria—before the abduction).
The research findings on victim vulnerability strongly support the parents’ claim that Maria is too young to consent. It is highlighted that children have ‘limited cognitive development’ and ‘susceptibility to sexual violence and forced marriage’.
The research also identifies how adolescence, rebellion, and risk-taking are vulnerabilities that are exploited by predators, though Maria’s parents do not believe she wanted to leave of her own accord.
The in depth report also provides formal language and analysis for the police and judicial indifference experienced by the family.
Impunity for perpetrators, with a lack of legal consequences have resulted in increased incidence as a key driver. This may provides an explanation for why the police brushed the family off and the magistrate’s quick acceptance of a questionable marriage certificate.
A day the family died
Erum Shahbaz dissolves into tears when she is asked about her daughter. Shahbaz remembers how she fainted the day Maria had disappeared. “We had all died that day, and we all still feel dead,” he says.
“As parents we are thinking the worst things,” weeps Erum, clutching at a wooden cross as she prays for Maria’s return. “What has he done to her, where and how is he keeping her – is he raping her? Has she been sold off somewhere? Has he killed and dumped her somewhere?”
Maria’s life had changed since the Covid-19 pandemic. She had to leave school a year after the pandemic began and resorted to working with her mother as a domestic worker to make ends meet.
Erum looks sadly at a picture of her daughter in her hand. “I just want her back, whatever it takes. I gave birth to her, I raised her. I am her mother. We had never even seen places like the police station, the courts – today this man has forced us to see them. I want my daughter back whatever it takes,” the grieving woman pleads for help.
A house of despair
At the end of each day, the family sit together pleading silently for the safe return of their beloved Maria. The three children – two girls and a little boy – along with their parents and grandparents sit on a charpoy, reciting from the Bible.
“Oh Lord, please return Maria to us,” prays the older one of the three, called Sneha. Her grandmother cries silently into her dupatta, while her grandfather sits in the corner in the shadows. It has been two years since he was affected by partial paralysis and now, he cannot work adding to the family’s burden. His helplessness has quietly turned into frustration. Shahbaz tries to comfort his mother who is sobbing relentlessly.
“It’s like when a person just dies – that’s what we all have felt: the ground has slipped from under our feet, and since she’s disappeared we have died a death while still being alive,” he mumbles. “I request the government – just give me back my girl. I just want my girl back.”