Remorseless monster
Once he was supposed to protect children. But he turned out to be a monster. The arrest of the habitual paedophile 45-year-old Sohail Ayaz strengthens the conviction that we are living in an age when firemen start fires instead of putting them out. This maniac has a long nasty history of sexually abusing children. He was recently arrested in Islamabad and confessed to raping 30 children in different places of the country and uploading the videos of the assaults to the dark web.
Police investigations have revealed that he is a convicted paedophile deported from the UK and Italy. He was sentenced to four years in prison in the UK and for six months in Italy. The police said Ayaz was convicted of sexually assaulting minors in the UK. He was arrested in London in 2009 after thousands of child porn images were discovered in his home. He was deported from Italy where he was part of a Romanian child pornography ring. The police said Ayaz was a chartered accountant and an expert on the dark web. At present he was earning Rs300,000 a month for providing consultancy service to a K-P government department. This salary proved insufficient to this greedy monster for he was also engaged in the child sex trade. This remorseless sex maniac is full of vices. His parents and wife have severed relations with him because of his activities.
The police said around two weeks ago Ayaz abducted an 11-year-old boy at a tea stall in Islamabad where the boy worked. He took the boy to his home where he drugged him and raped him for four days. He also filmed the assault. When the boy returned home he could not speak about his ordeal for 15 days. After much persuasion by the family, the boy disclosed what had happened to him. Ayaz’s neighbours told the police that they saw him bringing children to his home several times. Such men pose a grave danger to society.
Finding toilets
The Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government has announced an interesting health initiative under which a cell phone app will help direct users to public toilets across the province. News reports have quoted a provincial water and sanitation services official as saying that the app will be launched on November 19 and will be particularly helpful for tourists. Also, while many in Pakistan are quick to mock India for its low toilet usage numbers, the numbers here, though not as abysmal, are still a cause for concern. The United Nations Children’s Fund, or Unicef estimated last year that 22 million Pakistanis still regularly relieve themselves in the open, and less than half of the rural population has any access to toilets.
Unicef also estimates that the lack of toilets costs Pakistan up to $2.5 billion per year through increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. Around 53,000 Pakistani children are estimated to die each year of diarrhoea alone, primarily because of consuming polluted water from streams which are often ‘used’ in lieu of toilets, according to UN data. Meanwhile, typhoid, cholera, dysentery and hepatitis also kill thousands, while those who do not die often have lifelong ailments. The high stunting rate for children — 44% according to the UN — can partly be attributed to this.
Among the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s healthcare-related election promises, Prime Minister Imran Khan has previously vowed to “eradicate the deficit of toilets in the country by 2023”, an ambitious target, but certainly achievable. In the meantime, directing people to the nearest facility is a start, but we would also hope that the government improves the pitiful condition of many of these existing toilets while taking care not to cut corners in the construction of new ones. A warning of sorts came a few days ago in India, where two children were killed when the substandard wall of a public toilet collapsed on the stalls they were using.
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