Source: Times Online

The mother of Misbah Rana, the 13-year-old girl who fled to Pakistan to live with her father, said yesterday that she plans to go back to court because her daughter has been “banned” from contacting her.

Louise Campbell, whose missing daughter sparked an international police inquiry when she vanished from the Isle of Lewis last year, said that she had barely spoken to Misbah, formerly known as Molly, in the past two months after a row with her former husband.

Ms Campbell, who dropped her legal battle to have Misbah returned to Britain earlier this year because of the “psychological strain”, claims that Sajad Rana has banned her daughter from contacting her, confiscated her mobile phone and cut off her internet access.

Ms Campbell, 39, who lives in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, believes that she has little alternative but to go back to the Pakistani courts, but is concerned that the case might fall victim to the political situation.

She told a Sunday newspaper: “I now need to go back to court because Sajad has broken the court order. With with lawyers and judges involved in the conflicts facing [President] General Musharraf, I don’t know if they are going to look at my case or even give it a second thought. If they don’t I just don’t know how I am going to get in contact with my darling girl.

“I had the court order in my favour to say I could have round-the-clock contact with Molly by mobile phone and also on the webcam. She would text me saying, ‘Mum, come online’, and we would gab for hours.

“I have had just two, 15-minute phone calls from Molly since then [two months ago]. Her dad gave her a phonecard. He told her to tell me the internet server was down and the mobile phone was broken.

“He is punishing Molly even more because she was in contact with friends in Stornoway. We would all have a good chat at the same time. Now that’s gone.” Misbah, who was known to her friends in Scotland as Molly Campbell, vanished in August last year amid fears that her father had taken her to Pakistan to force her into a marriage with a man twice her age.

However, just days later, the schoolgirl surfaced in front of the world’s media in Lahore, where she insisted that she wanted to live as a Muslim and be known as Misbah Iram Rana.

In court filings, her father claimed that Ms Campbell, who was a devout Muslim when she married him, had become “unIslamic” and was having a corrosive influence on his daughter.

In a series of pleas – including a stage-managed phonecall to Ms Campbell in front of television cameras – Misbah begged to be allowed to remain in Pakistan and for her mother to drop her custody battle.

In January, her mother finally relented after an out-of-court settlement in which her husband allowed her visiting rights and regular telephone calls.

Although Ms Campbell’s claims could not be verified yesterday, it appears that the latest impasse came after she told immigration officials three months ago that her former husband was planning a visit to Britain – raising the possibility that they might arrest him over the circumstances in which Misbah left Scotland for Pakistan.

That she left without the permission of her mother – her legal guardian in Britain – meant that this was illegal. Mr Rana could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Ms Campbell, who still lives in Stornoway with her boyfriend and 18-month-old daughter, said: “Sajad was the one who arranged for Molly to be taken out of this country. I had to alert the authorities he was coming back. I couldn’t fail to tell them. I had to act properly.”

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Tags: isle of lewis, lousie campbell, misbah rana, molly campbell