Pakistani authorities freed 42 children Wednesday who had been kept in chains or ropes at a Muslim religious school near the city of Multan in Punjab province, a local police officer said.
The raid followed one on another Koranic school in Multan Tuesday in which 22 chained children aged eight to 14 were released.
Mian Mukhtar Ahmed, in charge of a police station in the Makhdoom Rashid area east of Multan, told Reuters his men had swooped on the Jamia Ghosia school and freed 42 captive children in a morning raid.
Police arrested one man on the spot but the superintendant of the religious school had fled earlier with the keys to the shackles. The chains had to be sawn off the children at the police station, witnesses said.
Riaz Memon, Assistant Commissioner of Multan, told Reuters earlier the children released in Tuesday's raid had been taken to a private welfare center run by the Edhi Trust.
He said legal proceedings had been started against Maulvi Hafez Amir Ahmad, the cleric in charge of the school raided Tuesday, and some parents who allegedly agreed to their children being chained.
The English-language Nation newspaper reported that some parents had even paid for their children to be shackled at the Madrasa Siddiqia Talim-al-Koran (Koranic instruction) school.
“Some of the recovered children told us that a few had been in chains for more than a year,” Memon said.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
drew attention in its 1995 report to the strict discipline imposed at some
Koranic schools. “Many even kept the children in chains round the clock
so that they... were not exposed to any outside influences, which were
all regarded as evil,” it said.