MADINAH, 2 February 2004 — This year’s Eid revived memories in a Saudi family of their five-year-old child, lost at Arafat 30 years ago during the Haj of 1393 AH. Since then his family members have searched for him everywhere — in Jizan, the Gulf states and even in far-away Peru.
Al-Watan interviewed the family of the missing Abdul Khaleq Awwad Al-Thubiani. His elder brother, Mufawez, explained: “We were three families at Arafat and we children were playing in front of the women’s section. I went inside and my mother told me to call my brother to come in and have some tea. I went out to call him but he had disappeared.”
The boy’s mother sent to the men’s section asking if her son was there. When the men answered that he was not, both men and women began to search for the boy.
Mufawez said: “My father, who was with us, died later without ever seeing his lost son again.”
He said that his father had informed the police of Abdul Khaleq’s disappearance. The boy’s father and his uncle went to all local police stations and hospitals but there was no sign of the boy.
Mufawez said that some of their relatives have seen a person from Peru looking for his lost family. “The person told of incidents similar to those surrounding my brother’s disappearance,” he said.
The family contacted the Ministry of Interior which in turn contacted a Saudi diplomat in South America who made arrangements for the person to perform Umrah and visit Madinah in order to meet the family. But Mufawez said: “He was not my brother. He was 10 years old when my brother disappeared.”
In another incident, a local paper published a story about a person from Jizan searching for his family but once again, he was not the missing son.
During the interview with the family, Al-Watan noticed that the boy’s mother was optimistic, and often quoted a verse from Holy Qur’an: “O my sons! go ye, And enquire about Joseph and his brother, and never give up hope of God’s soothing mercy: truly no one despairs of God’s soothing mercy, except those who have no faith.”
The mother said: “The One who reunited Joseph with his father and his brother can also reunite me and my son.” She remembered that 13 years after her son had disappeared, some of her neighbors brought her an advertisement published by someone called Yousuf in Qatar, saying that he had found a child in Arafat in the same year that she lost her child.
“I called the number, but the woman who answered the phone gave a different description from my son,” she said. “I tore up the magazine and threw away the phone number but I now feel that it may have been him and that I should have gone to see for myself.”
