WARMINGTON: More to the story of Amber Alert for Markham girl
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Thanks to a mom and an alert woman at a Markham business, last week’s Amber Alert worked perfectly.
As York Regional Police Const. Andy Pattenden said so well, the Amber Alert helped them locate a five-year-old girl reported as the victim of a possible abduction.
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After being arrested, the father, Soloman Jaffri, was deemed not to have violated any laws when he signed out his daughter from school at 2 p.m. on Tuesday.
“I did not abduct my daughter,” the 26-year-old wrote the next day on Facebook. “I was not charged with anything.”
This is true.
But there is more to the story that prompted the mother’s call to police and the issuance of the Amber Alert.
Sources close to the case told The Toronto Sun the girl’s mother was shocked to learn her daughter had been taken out of school because she was unaware the father, to whom she is estranged, was in a position to take her.
Based on her information on his whereabouts, she believed he would not have been able to pick her up at that time, said a source.
“She was shocked,” the source said.
Sources said Jaffri had interactions with police in the past and that factored into the decision to issue the alert.
“He couldn’t be reached on his cellphone and his place of residence was forcefully entered and he or the girl were not there,” said a source. “An Amber Alert had to be called at that point. Better safe than sorry.”
Meanwhile, sources say the girl’s mother was not at fault in any way.
She was also affected and influenced by last month’s abduction and murder of an 11-year-old Brampton girl at the hands of her father, who later took his own life.
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“Suggestions she should be charged or had created a negative narrative of the father are false,” said a police source. “She was just trying to find her daughter.”
York Regional Police would not comment further.
But some law enforcement people scorned social media suggesting the mother was in the wrong or should be charged.
Jaffri, in his post, wrote “any accusations initially made against me were made out of spite” and the “worst possible picture of me was chosen to depict me as a criminal.”
He added he has “hope the system isn’t misused again and innocent fathers and their children aren’t put through the trouble my daughter and I were put through.”
But, the system was not misused. It was used as designed.
Jaffri later posted another message on Facebook post saying he does not blame police.
“I understand that the police were fulfilling their duties by filing the Amber Alert with the information they were given and they couldn’t take a chance,” he wrote. “Their system does work.”
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