LAHORE: The police say they have resolved the disappearance of a young man from Kahna who went missing 11 years ago, arresting six people in connection with what they describe as an abduction and murder.
According to police sources, Shakeel Haider, 20, was allegedly killed by his cousins and friends, after which his body was disposed of in the BRB canal.
Kahna police have arrested six people — the cousins and friends of the deceased.
During investigation, the arrested men allegedly told investigators that they had killed Shakeel Haider and put his body in the BRB canal.
Police said that despite 11 years having passed, the remains of the deceased have not been recovered. Every effort was made to locate them, but without success.
The absence of a body is the central difficulty in this case, and it is worth stating plainly rather than treating the arrests as a conclusion.
Statements made to police during investigation are not admissible as evidence in Pakistani courts. A confession carries weight only when recorded before a magistrate under Section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and even then it can be retracted at trial — as such statements frequently are.
That leaves the prosecution reliant on corroboration. Without remains, there is no post-mortem, no cause of death, and no forensic link between any accused and the deceased. Cases resting on retracted statements and no recovered body have repeatedly failed at trial or on appeal.
None of which means the police account is wrong. It means the investigation, not the arrests, will determine the outcome.
The interval raises the question of what happened in between. A missing-person report from 2015 that produces arrests in 2026 implies either that new information surfaced or that the case was reopened and reworked.
Neither has been stated. Whether an FIR was registered at the time of the disappearance, what investigation followed, and what prompted the case to move now are questions the police account does not answer.
For families of missing persons, that gap is the recurring grievance — not that cases are impossible, but that they go dormant.
The accused are relatives of the deceased. In cases where the accused and the complainant belong to the same family, Pakistani criminal proceedings face a specific vulnerability: the law permits compromise in offences against the person, and pressure within a family to reach a settlement can end a prosecution regardless of the evidence gathered.
The six arrested men have not been convicted of any offence, no charges have yet been framed, and the account of their alleged disclosures comes from police sources. All retain the presumption of innocence.
The Lahore Times has sought the case FIR number and confirmation of the original 2015 report from Kahna police.
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