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Missing woman from India returns home after 22 years

Missing woman from India returns home after 22 years

An Indian woman who says she was trafficked to Pakistan more than two decades ago has finally returned home — 18 months after her grandson saw her in a YouTube video.

Hamida Banu said she had spent the past 22 years "like a living corpse", trapped in the neighboring country and unable to contact her family.

Banu was tricked into going to Pakistan after accepting what was supposed to be a job in Dubai in 2002, the Telegraph reports.


Both India and Pakistan - which share a frosty bilateral relationship - carried out extensive checks on her identity before her Indian citizenship was confirmed in October.

"They tricked me into Pakistan by promising me Dubai. I tolerated the separation for 23 years," the 75-year-old told reporters after crossing into India.

In 2002, Banu financially supported her four children after her husband's death by working as a cook in Qatar, Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

She was approached by a recruitment agent who said she could help arrange a job in Dubai. The agent asked her to pay 20,000 rupees ($250).

But as Banu recalled in her 2022 video interview, instead of Dubai, she was brought to the city of Hyderabad in Pakistan and kept in a house for three months.

She later married a street vendor in Karachi who died during the Covid-19 pandemic. She told BBC Punjabi that her husband never bothered her.

Her story made headlines in July 2022 after Indian journalist Khalfan Shaikh happened to watch the YouTube interview conducted by Pakistani social media activist Waliullah Maroof and shared it on his platform. /Telegraph/