ISLAMABAD: An elderly man from Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province who went missing in the 1970s has been found to be living in Iran and earlier this week, in a video call arranged by Arab News, reconnected with his family for the first time in decades.
According to his relatives, Mumtaz Khan left his home in Upper Dir district and traveled to Karachi when his father scolded him for not financially contributing to the family.
“Our elders told us that he left home the day his father reprimanded him for not earning anything,” Nasir Khan, Mumtaz’s nephew, told Arab News on Wednesday. “In those days, many people from Upper Dir went to Karachi to secure a livelihood and some of them even continued their journey to places like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
Khan said that his uncle decided to go to Iran without informing his family after some of his friends convinced him to accompany them to the neighboring country by taking land route to earn more money.
Shafiqullah Khan, a cloth merchant in Iran’s Chabahar port city, told Arab News the border controls with Iran and Afghanistan were not too tight back in those days and it was possible to cross the porous frontier without carrying necessary travel documents.
Khan, who originally belongs to Pakistan’s Balochistan province and helped the family reunite by arranging a video call, said that Mumtaz told him he had arrived in Chabahar with his friends on a bus before beginning to work in the construction industry as a laborer.
“Mumtaz Khan also got married in Chabahar and has two sons and two daughters,” he continued. “The problem is that he neither has the Pakistani nor Iranian nationality, though his children are Iranian citizens.”
The nephew of the elderly Pakistani man in Iran said his family started receiving congratulatory messages after discovering that his uncle had been alive and living in Chabahar for five decades.
“We don’t know how to express happiness,” he said. “It is like my uncle has got a new life.”
Mumtaz’s relatives said their search for the missing family member ended three weeks ago after they saw his video circulated by Shafiqullah Khan.
“After tracing Mumtaz Khan’s relatives and brothers in Pakistan, I connected him with his relatives to talk to one another,” Khan, the Chabahar-based cloth merchant, told Arab News over the phone. “Now, we will try to facilitate his return to his hometown in Pakistan.”
Mumtaz’s younger brother, Gulabbudin Khan, said his family did not believe the video initially.
“For years, we were unable to trace him despite hectic efforts,” he continued. “But his recent viral video led us to identify and connect with him.”
“We can’t wait to be reunited with Mumtaz Khan,” he added. “We want the government to facilitate his return to Pakistan.”
