Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, Sept 12: There was a time when a Srinagar based correspondent with an international news organisation used to help people find their missing relatives, but for the past five days his frantic search to locate his own missing relatives has yielded no results.
The journalist has been running from one relief camp to another across the Srinagar city to find out the whereabouts of his missing father-in-Law, Prof Syed Ghulam Jeelani who went missing after being rescued from the inundated Jawahar Nagar area five days ago.
“It been five days now and we have no information about the whereabouts of my father-in-law,” he said.
He said that even though the family was aware that he was rescued, but his whereabouts were not known.
“His son who is a doctor in Mauritius has also reached here when he came to know about his missing dad,” the journalist said.
He said that for the past five days he has been leaving his house at 5 in the morning and returns midnight after a daylong ‘unfruitful’ search.
“We have been to every Gurudwara, every mosque and every other place where we came to know that evacuated people have been kept, but so far we haven’t been able to locate him,” he says.
Like him, there is a large number of people who are concerned about their ‘missing’ relatives, though some have the information of their relatives being evacuated from their inundated houses, many still have no information about their family members.
“Four members of my family were rescued by the local volunteers when my house suddenly submerged into the water on that fateful night, but I have no idea where they have been putting up” Zahoor Ahmed a resident of Mehjoor Nagar said.
Sarabjeet Singh a volunteer at the Shaheed Bunga Gurudwara in Barzulla Bagat says that they have compiled a database of the flood-affected people who have taken shelter at the Gurudwara.
“There are around 1600 families presently staying in this Gurudwara and we have compiled their database, comprising their phone number and address.
“We have put the database on the internet so that their relatives could know about the whereabouts of their missing ones” Singh said.
Singh also said that a control room set by a group of young Sikh engineers, receive around 400 to 500 calls a day from people searching for their relatives.
“There were many kids who came to this place and we helped their families to locate them and many were reunited with their parents” Singh said.
Similar database is being complied by a local mosque in the area, which is being shared with the control room set up by Singh and his group.
“We all working in coordination to help as much as we can and we share the details of the missing people we collect with the every control room so as to trace the missing people” said Iftiqar Ahmed a Molvi at the local mosque at Barzulla Bagat.
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