A week on, whereabouts of the missing Samakhusi boy remain unknown
Police say rains and closed drainage systems have hampered efforts to recover the missing boy. Armed Police Force members form a human chain as they scour the Bagmati River in the Chalnakhel area, south of Kathmandu, in search of a 13-year-old boy, Sajan Magar Post Photo
Over a week since Sajan Ale Magar, 13, got swept away due to a flash flood in a local stream in Samakhusi, Kathmandu, he still remains missing.
On July 23, the flash flood had breached the embankments and swept away the sixth-grader.
Police said they had sent a search team to fix the ropes and search for the victim.
“We have done everything that we could do but have not been able to find the boy’s body,” said Superintendent Angur GC, who is the chief of police in Circle Maharajgunj.
Nabin Manandhar, spokesperson for Kathmandu Metropolitan City, said they have been searching for the body in the Bishnumati river too for the past three days.
“The City started its drive but due to the rain we could not sustain it,” said Manandhar.
“If the river was not covered, the boy could have been located.”
KMC’s police chief Raju Nath Pandey has told the Post that if the City was allowed to open the slabs and clear encroached areas, the boy could have been saved.
Last Sunday’s incident has not only troubled the police, it has also worried Samakhushi locals, who say they fear their children might be the next victims.
Urban planner Suman Meher Shrestha said that the KMC’s faulty infrastructure design and rampant encroachment is bound to cost lives and properties.
He also said he endorses KMC Mayor Balendra Shah’s demolition drive in the encroached-upon lands.
Sunday’s incident is not an isolated case in the Kathmandu Valley, which reports deaths and destruction during the monsoon every year.
In September 2021, Ujjwal BK, a 10-year-old boy, fell into an open drain in Kapan. The boy’s dead body was found in Lalitpur after five days. Prior to that, in July 2017, Binita Phuyal, 12, had died after she fell into an open drain in Tarakeswar Municipality. The same year, another teenage schoolgirl was swept into a drainage pipe during heavy rain. Miraculously, she survived after the water current pushed her out to another end.
In the Valley, open drainage sewage and uncovered manholes are not anomalies; rather they are the norm. And with every monsoon, things get worse, as drainages inundate the roads and conceal those holes, which are potential deathtraps.
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