By Ayman Amzein.
Benghazi, 20 June 2014:
The sad part first. Not for the first time, a baby was abandoned in Benghazi yesterday.
The story . . .[restrict]started in the morning when a young lady and her grandmother whom she had taken to the city’s 7 October Hospital were quietly sitting waiting for test results. A women, fully veiled wearing a black abaya, came up and asked them if they would hold her baby son while she went to the toilet. That was about 9.30am. More than an hour later, the mother had not returned and the other two women had become extremely concerned. No one in the hospital appeared to have seen the veiled woman. She had completely disappeared.
“I called my father and told him a woman has asked me to hold her baby and had disappeared,” the young woman told the Libya Herald.
The girl’s father arrived and despite efforts by him and the hospital director to locate the women no one could find her.
The police were contacted but they too could not help. There was no way of tracing the veiled women who had handed over the infant.
In the end of the family took the baby home. Given the present situation in Benghazi, there seemed no alternative.
By this morning, the family had decided that they would like to adopt the boy, who according to the hospital was two months old. It seemed like a relatively happy end to a sad story.
But there was then an unexpected and much happier twist.
The baby’s real family tuned up today.Their story is that the boy had been taken from them two weeks ago in Misrata. The kidnappers had then contacted them demanding a ransom of LD 15,000. But, being very poor, they had not been able to pay up. Finally, they said, they had received a message from the kidnappers that if they wanted their child they had to go to Benghazi.
This they did and filed a report with the Benghazi police, giving details of marks on the infant’s body.
Today the police managed to link the kidnapped baby to the one abandoned in the hospital.
The boy has now been reunited with this family. [/restrict]
