Lost boy Abdullah’s case: Court gives custody to maternal grandmother

KARACHI: A local court on Friday gave legal custody of four-year-old Abdullah, who was living at an Edhi Centre, to his maternal grandmother.

The grandmother, mother of Abdullah’s deceased mother Haleema, had filed a plea in the court last week to get custody of the child.

She had claimed in the plea that Chaudhry Iqbal, 69, who claims to be the father of the abandoned child, could not look after the child.

The court has said that Iqbal can meet the child whenever he wants to. Iqbal, who has said he is the legal and biological father of Abdullah, has been fighting to get custody of the child for weeks.

Abdullah was brought to the Edhi Centre on May 31 by a man named Rizwan who claimed to have found him at Sea View. A day later police recovered the body of Abdullah’s mother Haleema from an apartment at Delhi Colony, which was found to have been handed over to her through Rizwan - a real estate agent.

Rizwan then went missing, but was later arrested by the police as the prime suspect in the case. After earlier confessing to murdering Haleema, he retracted his statement and claimed that Haleema might have been killed by her stepson, Ansar. Rizwan was sent to prison on judicial remand.