JEDDAH, 7 June 2006 — In an alarming growing trend, children as young as five are vanishing into thin air leaving no trace of their whereabouts. Distressed parents wait in anguish for them to return. But most of these lost-children seem to just disappear while others are found murdered and abused.

Questions are being asked as to why children go missing. Who are the kidnappers? Are they foreigners or beggars? Do they deal in the buying and selling of human parts?

Quite sometime ago, a young girl called Ebtihal mysteriously went missing in Majmaa. Despite the fact that Ebtihal disappeared quite some time ago her family continue looking for her with the hope of finding her one day.

When Ebtihal disappeared there was widespread horror in Saudi society. Speaking to the Makkah-based Al-Nadwa newspaper, a relative of Ebtihal said: “No one knows where she is now. Her parents are suffering great emotional pain and her mother’s condition is deteriorating day by day. What we fear the most is that she was kidnapped by a drug addict or a drunkard.”

As Umm Omar spoke about her missing son she found it difficult to hold back her tears. Her son Omar, aged 10, has been missing for nine months. “I asked my son Omar to go and buy some bread from a store next to our house. Minutes passed and then hours and I became worried. I went out looking for him but it was as if the ground had swallowed him. There was no trace of him anywhere.”

Umm Omar says she reported to the police that her son was missing but till this day they still have not found him. “God only knows the pain and torture that I suffer inside. I never smile since my son went missing and I need to take sleeping pills at night. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead and eating or not? I am desperate to find information about him. I even quit my job because I just couldn’t concentrate anymore.”

Another mother who lost her daughter is Umm Yasmeen. When her five-year-old daughter Yasmeen went missing, Umm Yasmeen lost movement in her legs. In tears she said, “Yasmeen was full of energy and was smart and beautiful. She used to fill the house with happiness and laughter.”

Umm Yasmeen paused and cried before continuing, “Everyday I remember giving her SR1 to buy candy from the store nearby. She was very happy with the riyal that I gave her and that was the last time I saw my only child. No one knows where my daughter is, the last time she was seen was in the shop buying some candy.”

Not long ago, the body of a missing Afghan child was found inside a bag in fields outside Madinah. The grim discovery of the body shocked residents in the peaceful city and the police were urged to find the culprits.

Since then parents became cautious by preventing their children from going out at night and by keeping a lookout for strangers within neighborhoods.

Psychologist Dr. Adnan Qattan said cases of children disappearing were an alarming problem. He said there were issues with overstayers, which were causing problems. Other reasons, he mentioned, were the remoteness of some neighborhoods and the negative effect of television, which seem to be instigating people into kidnapping and raping children.

“Most of these crimes could be attributed to drugs and liquor. Drug addicts do not differentiate between children, women and old women. They primarily concern themselves with fulfilling their carnal desires,” he said.

Qattan mentioned that the growing numbers of foreign workers were also part of the problem. “If we look at the total foreign work force we see that 75 percent of them are living single in the Kingdom because they cannot afford to bring in their families with them. This drives some of them, especially the overstayers, to commit crimes.

“There was a story of an Asian limousine driver that kidnapped a five-year-old girl and gang-raped her with his friends in a remote area. The girl could not bear the pain and died from her injuries,” he pointed out.

Qattan said there were many cruel and terrible incidents of overstayers entering the country and abusing children. He said: “Families are sometimes negligent and leave their children to play in the street by themselves. Most of the time, kidnappers look for young children because they cannot resist and defend themselves.”