LAHORE: The residents the Cholistan desert in South Punjab on Friday blamed local authorities for the poor response time that they claim resulted in the death of three young girls who lost their way in a sandstorm last week and died. 
The three girls — sisters Tahira (10) and Allah Moaafi (6) from Vehari, and their cousin Suraya (11), whom they were visiting — were playing near Suraya’s home in Toba Sher Wala, Fort Abbas Tehsil, in the Bahawalnagar District when they were caught in the storm. Disoriented by the dust, they ran away from the village into the desert.
“We thought our girls were somewhere in the village and would soon return home,” said Naseer, Suraya’s father. As a result, the family did not begin looking for the girls until nearly three hours had passed and evening had fallen. At that time, they did not contact the police or local authorities.
The sandstorm had erased the girls’ footprints making it extremely difficult for anyone to track them. According to the postmortem report, the cause of their deaths was “dehydration and exhaustion.”
The family finally informed the police the following day that the girls had disappeared, but, according to some villagers, the authorities did not take the matter seriously. 
“The police came over, told us to find the girls on our own and then left,” one villager said. “Had the girls belonged to upper Punjab, the whole law enforcement machine would have jumped into action and searched for them. But we are poor people, living far away from the eyes of the rulers. We are the worthless people of South Punjab whose voices never reach Lahore.”
The police said it was not a criminal case. “The girls lost their way due to the storm and got stranded in the desert where they lost their lives since they got exhausted and couldn’t find a drop of water,” Officer Abd Al-Razzaq told Arab News.
But the sisters’ father, Zafar Iqbal, believes the police would have reacted differently if the girls came from a wealthy family. “Being poor is a crime,” he said. “Nobody listens to us. If we were rich, everybody would have come to our rescue.”
The police rejected such claims. “The police were not informed,” they said in a press release. “Instead, we got information about the incident from social media. The police formed a special search squad with two police vehicles, 10 private cars and 50 motorcycles. The squad searched for the girls for two days under the supervision of SP investigations, until the police found the bodies.”
Abbas Raza, Assistant Commissioner, Fort Abbas, told Arab News, “The district administration tried to use all its resources. We could not fly a chopper due to the storm, which lasted for four days. As you know, even flights are suspended in bad weather. How could we have used a helicopter? Nevertheless, we tried our best to rescue the girls but couldn’t find them in time, since they had died even before this case came to the notice of the authorities.” The coroner’s report suggested the girls had been dead for between 36 and 72 hours before their bodies were found.