For families of Bangladesh’s 2,000 missing children, the wait feels forever

Halima Khatun, now in her sixties, had raised her granddaughter Maimuna since the girl was three, after Maimuna's mother died of kidney failure. She enrolled her in a madrasa when she was five and watched her grow up. Then, one afternoon, Halima stepped into the bathroom. When she came out, Maimuna was nowhere to be found.

For, that brief stretch of ordinary time has become a dividing line in her life — the moment before her granddaughter disappeared and everything that came after. 

45 days later, Halima was still searching.

"I have not left a single alley in Dhaka city unsearched," she said at a recent press conference in Dhaka organised by MUN Alert Bangladesh, her voice breaking. "I have searched above and below every overbridge for my Maimuna. I searched on foot so that I might suddenly catch sight of her. But there was no use."

Halima does not need a briefing document to understand what child protection experts call the golden time — the crucial first few hours after a child goes missing, when the trail is still warm and the chances of finding them are highest. She knows only that those hours passed, and Maimuna did not come home.

Even the formality of filing a police complaint, she said, gave her nothing to hold on to.

There is a particular kind of silence in a room full of people waiting for the same phone call. It is not the silence of grief; it is the silence of people who, like Halima, have run out of places to look for their missing children.

That silence filled the hall at the MUN Alert press conference. The seating arrangement told its own story before a single word was spoken. On one side sat journalists with notebooks and cameras. On the stage was a different cast entirely — not the usual parade of officials and dignitaries, but domestic workers, garment workers, cleaners and day labourers. Ordinary people had been rendered extraordinary by an unbearable circumstance: each was the parent, grandparent or sibling of a child who had disappeared.

Some had been searching for eight days. One had been searching for 17 years.

The numbers behind their faces are staggering enough to make it easy to lose sight of the humans inside them, so it is worth sitting with the numbers for a moment before returning to the humans. 

Bangladesh Police Headquarters recorded 15,243 children between the ages of 10 and 17 reported missing in the first seven months of 2026 alone. 

Of those, 13,273 came home or were rescued, a recovery rate that, on paper, looks almost reassuring. But paper does not have to live with the remainder: 1,970 children in that age bracket are still out there, still unaccounted for. Add the youngest cohort — 474 children aged nought to nine reported missing over the same stretch, of whom 68 remain unrescued — and the country arrives at a quiet, devastating arithmetic: more than 2,000 children who walked out of a home, a school, a madrasa, a field, and simply did not walk back.

The faces of children who went missing and were later found to have been killed.

13% of the missing, Police Headquarters says, are never found in time to be counted among the rescued. That is a statistic. It is also Maimuna. It is also Zubayer, Rupa, Azmain, Anand, Afrin, Yadav — names that belong to no press release, only to the people who came to that hall carrying them.

It was in memory of a name like these that the system got its own name. MUN Alert — Missing Urgent Notification — is built around the story of Muntaaha Akter Zarin, a five-year-old girl who was abducted and killed in Sylhet in 2024. Her death became the argument for something Bangladesh did not yet have: a coordinated, technology-driven, nationwide response to a child vanishing.

Modelled loosely on the United States' AMBER Alert, MUN Alert went live on 13 January 2026, a joint effort between the Bangladesh Police's Criminal Investigation Department and Amber Alert for Bangladesh, anchored by a 24-hour toll-free helpline: 13219.

Its entire philosophy rests on a single, almost brutal insight: missing-child cases are won or lost in what responders call the golden time — the first few hours after a child disappears, when a trail is still warm and a city can still be asked, urgently and all at once, to look.

Mohammad Rubel's story runs on a different clock, not minutes but days, each one counted like a debt coming due. His son Zubayer, 13, disappeared from a madrasa in Patuakhali. It took two days for the madrasa to even confirm that the boy hadn't simply gone home. By the time Rubel stood in that hall in Dhaka, it had been 72 days.

"I sell vegetables from a van for a living," he said. "I do not have the means to search for my son on my own. I earnestly appeal to the police, the administration and the government: please bring my son back to me."

There was no theatre in the way he said it. It was simply the truest sentence he had.

A room filled with grieving parents, each carrying the weight of a child still missing.

And then there was Swapna Akter, who brought her seven-year-old son to speak for the daughter who could no longer speak for herself. Rupa was three when she disappeared; more than a year has passed since.

Swapna has crossed the country looking. "I no longer care about my life," she said. "I only want my daughter back. And I want a system to be introduced in Bangladesh like those in other countries, so that whenever someone goes missing, everyone is informed immediately. No one should ever go missing like this again."

Ruhul Amin, whose son Anand is 14 and missing from Keraniganj. Another Rubel, whose daughter Afrin is 11 and missing from Jamalpur. Archana Karmakar, whose son Yadav is five and missing from Savar. None of them had met before that hall. None of them needed introductions.

"I no longer care about my life. I only want my daughter back. And I want a system to be introduced in Bangladesh like those in other countries, so that whenever someone goes missing, everyone is informed immediately. No one should ever go missing like this again." Swapna Akter, Mother of a missing girl

Police explain the disappearances in the flat language of incident reports: young children lost while travelling, unable to recall an address, wandering off in unfamiliar places; older children driven away by resentment, academic pressure, shame, the pull of independence, family discord, the influence of friends. The explanations are not wrong. They are simply too small for what they are meant to hold, a decade of a family's history compressed into a clause on a form.

A decade of a family’s history, compressed into a single name, a photograph, and a plea to be found.”

The paperwork, meanwhile, keeps piling up. General diaries for missing persons slightly fell from 17,808 in 2023 to 16,414 in 2024, before climbing to as high as 22,550 in 2025 — a figure police partly attribute to the growing convenience of filing complaints online. But Police Headquarters could not say how many of those reported missing eventually returned home. The rescues exist somewhere in the records. What remains missing is the larger picture: how many were found, and what happened to them along the way.

For Mohammad Azam, whose 13 year old brother Azmain disappeared from the field in front of their own house in Rangpur, the gap between the reporting and the response was its own small cruelty. The police, he said, would not file a complaint until 24 hours had passed, and then, once that time had passed, asked why the family had waited so long. Three and a half months later, he said, an officer finally told them, "Now we will also search, and you search as well." 

Azmain is still missing.