KARACHI: The Sindh High Court on Thursday directed the police to make serious efforts to locate the whereabouts of missing persons by using modern devices.

The SHC once again ordered the secretaries of ministries of interior and defence to collect reports from the intern-ment centres in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the cases of missing persons and produce the same on the next hearing.

While hearing a set of petitionsseekingrecovery of missing persons, a twojudge bench headed by Justice Naimatullah Phulpoto also issued directives to repeat the sessions of joint investigation team (JIT) and provincial task force (PTF) for missing persons before next hearings.

The bench noted that Head Constable Syed Khurram Hussain had gone missing sinceFebruary 2021, but reports from internment centres were still awaited.

In another petition, the bench observed that a 15-year-old boy had gone missing for the past eight years, but police were still clueless to locate his whereabouts.

It stated that in this regard several sessions of JIT and PTF were held but without any result.

In the matter of missing persons Younus Khan and Saqib Afridi, who went missing in 2015 from the metropolis, the reports of the ministriesof interior and defence stated that they had not been held in any internment centre of KP, it added.

In a petition filed in 2017, the bench directed the police and the Federal Investigation Agency to collect information from the Pakistan Tele communic ation Authority about ownership of SIMs with mobile data record of missing person as well as to carry out DNA tests for matching with record of unclaimed bodies and travel history of the person in question.