Lina Sardar Khil, a 3-year-old girl who emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States with her family and survived a bomb attack in Kabul, has been missing for months in San Antonio, Texas.
Her mother, Zarmeena Sardar Khil, explained to the police that the minor was playing with other children in a park next to her house: she saw the back of her head through the window but when she looked out again five minutes later there was no no trace of her.
More than nine months have passed and no one has seen the girl again.
The San Antonio Police Department and the FBI have investigated the case, following every lead no matter how absurd or crazy it seemed, including those from mediums who claimed to have seen her in her visions, according to The New York Times.
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Lina Sardar KhilFBI via Telemundo San Antonio
His family immigrated to the United States three years ago thanks to a special visa obtained by the father, Riaz Sardar Khil, an Afghan soldier who assisted US troops on their mission in Afghanistan.
They settled in a working-class neighborhood of San Antonio, a predominantly Latino Texan city now home to more than 2,000 Afghan immigrants.
Last summer, the family traveled to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, to reunite with their relatives.
His trip coincided with the abrupt withdrawal of US troops.
When they learned that all US soldiers, as well as several Afghan collaborators, were being evacuated, the family rushed to the airport where several thousand gathered to flee the country fearing the Taliban would retake power.
Zarmeena Sardar Khil and her daughter were standing just feet from the scene where a suicide bomb attack killed 13 US soldiers near Kabul airport.
The girl fainted after the explosion and her mother believed for a moment that she had died, but they managed to escape unharmed and believed to leave behind the violence with a new stage in Texas.
"We came from Afghanistan to have a happy and peaceful life here, but that did not happen," Riaz Sardar Khil lamented in an interview with The New York Times.
"My whole life has been ruined," he added.
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San Antonio Police Chief William McManus told the newspaper that there is no one in the community he has spoken with who is not baffled by the girl's disappearance.
"Nobody vanishes into thin air and I don't think Lina did. I never give up. I don't think the police will ever give up," he said.
His mother says that they had spent most of the week locked in their one-bedroom apartment in Villas del Cabo because it had been raining and it was cold outside.
But on December 20 at 5:30 p.m., after pleas from Lina and her brother Rayhan, she allowed them to go out with the other children to a playground a few feet from their home.
Lina was wearing a black jacket and a red skirt with black shoes that day.
Time stopped for Zarmeena Sardar Khil when she realized that Lina was not in the playground.
But he tried not to be too alarmed, thinking that she couldn't be far away, according to him.
She may have broken into another Afghan refugee's house, something the children of the residential complex used to do when they wanted a glass of water or to go to the bathroom.
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For half an hour he knocked on the door of all the residences he knew, but nobody had seen his daughter, according to what he says.
In a state of panic, she called her husband, who was away from her at his trucking job, to tell him that the girl had disappeared.
Police arrived at the apartment complex around 8 p.m. and conducted a thorough inspection of the apartment complex, checking every corner, including the trash cans.
They brought in dogs trained to sniff and closed the place so that no one could enter or leave.
"We do not skimp on anything," said the police chief.
The FBI sent specialized divers to search a nearby creek, but they also found nothing.
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Community members volunteered to help search squads in a 30-mile radius, also without success.
Now, many Afghan parents in San Antonio say they are afraid to let their children out of their sight for a second.
Zarmeena Sardar Khil keeps a plastic bag with her daughter's clothes and other objects, hoping that one day she can give them back to her.
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