On December 28, 2009, a family travelling to Karachi on the Millat Express faced every parent’s nightmare. Dr Nasir Hasan Luck was waiting at the station when he discovered that his five year old daughter, Zainab, was no longer with her mother and older sister. She had accidentally fallen from the train near Dhabeji.
The train was stopped roughly one to two kilometres from where she had fallen. Her mother, accompanied by around 20 to 25 passengers, got off and began searching. Local residents soon joined them, turning a frightening family emergency into a community search.
The search continued for around four hours. The people looking for Zainab were not relatives or close friends. They were passengers who had been travelling on the same train and local residents who chose to help a family they had never met.
One passenger, Jamil, left his own family aboard the train and stayed behind with Zainab’s mother to help organise the search. Another passenger, Asif, contacted the railway authorities, the Edhi Centre and the police as efforts continued.
Then a young Pakhtun boy, whose name Dr Luck was unable to learn, spotted Zainab in the woodland.
Zainab was found unharmed after spending four hours separated from her family. When Dr Luck finally saw his daughter again, she told him simply, Papa, I was alone. For her parents, those words captured the fear of a child who had spent hours without knowing where her family was.
But the incident also left behind another memory: people who had never met Zainab had stopped what they were doing to look for her. Passengers stayed behind, local residents searched the area, and others contacted the authorities and emergency services.
On December 28, 2009, a family travelling to Karachi on the Millat Express faced every parent’s nightmare.
On December 28, 2009, a family travelling to Karachi on the Millat Express faced every parent’s nightmare. Dr Nasir Hasan Luck was waiting at the station when he discovered that his five year old daughter, Zainab, was no longer with her mother and older sister. She had accidentally fallen from the train near Dhabeji.
The train was stopped roughly one to two kilometres from where she had fallen. Her mother, accompanied by around 20 to 25 passengers, got off and began searching. Local residents soon joined them, turning a frightening family emergency into a community search.
The search continued for around four hours. The people looking for Zainab were not relatives or close friends. They were passengers who had been travelling on the same train and local residents who chose to help a family they had never met.
One passenger, Jamil, left his own family aboard the train and stayed behind with Zainab’s mother to help organise the search. Another passenger, Asif, contacted the railway authorities, the Edhi Centre and the police as efforts continued.
Then a young Pakhtun boy, whose name Dr Luck was unable to learn, spotted Zainab in the woodland.
Zainab was found unharmed after spending four hours separated from her family. When Dr Luck finally saw his daughter again, she told him simply, Papa, I was alone. For her parents, those words captured the fear of a child who had spent hours without knowing where her family was.
But the incident also left behind another memory: people who had never met Zainab had stopped what they were doing to look for her. Passengers stayed behind, local residents searched the area, and others contacted the authorities and emergency services.
