A 10-year-old housekeeper was beaten and tortured to death and his younger brother was seriously injured after their masters caught them stealing fruit, police said.
Officers said the boys had been tortured for several days at their employer’s home in an upscale area of Lahore.
The attacks are the latest to highlight the exploitation of child labor and young domestic workers in Pakistan.
It is feared that the problem has been exacerbated by deteriorating economic conditions, as poor families try to survive by finding work for their children.
Police were tipped off by doctors when the boy named Kamran and his six-year-old brother Rizwan were taken to hospital with serious injuries.
Shortly afterwards, Kamran was pronounced dead, while Rizwan’s condition was critical.
Officers arrested those who took the children to hospital, but the owners of the house fled, the investigating officer told the Telegraph.
The boys were originally from the southern city of Bahawalpur in Punjab and had been working at the house in the Defense Housing Authority district for more than a year, police said.
“This is outrageous. The murderers of an innocent child should receive an exemplary punishment. The government must support this case so that the perpetrators cannot go free,” a human rights activist named Sheryar Rizwan told the Press Trust of India.
The problem of child labor in Pakistan
Pakistan has huge numbers of children in work, and according to a 2018 report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), about 12 million are employed.
The abuse of young domestic workers has made headlines before.
Two years ago, an eight-year-old maid was allegedly beaten to death by her employers for releasing their prized parrots from a cage.
Zohra Shah opened the cage to feed the birds, but the birds flew away. Her irate employers at the house in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, were accused of knocking her unconscious before dumping her at a nearby hospital. She died of her injuries.
In another infamous case, the Supreme Court overturned the extended three-year jail term against a former judge and his wife convicted of torturing their 10-year-old maid Tayyaba.
The United Nations warned last month that around the world, the disruption of schools caused by the two-year Covid lockdown had put more children at risk of being forced into child labour.
By the end of 2022, some nine million children will still be at risk of forced labor, UNICEF, the UN children’s rights division, warned.
The problem of child labor is worldwide. The United Nations Labor Department, the International Labor Organization, estimated a decade ago that more than 17 million children under the age of 18 were employed as maids, servants or domestic workers.
The issue was highlighted again in the UK this week when Sir Mo Farah, the four-time Olympic running champion, said he had previously lied about his background as a refugee and had in fact been trafficked as a child.
Somali-born Sir Mo described in a BBC documentary how he was brought to Britain at the age of nine and said he was forced to cook, clean and look after younger children by a couple who told him he would never see his real family again if he told anyone the truth .
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