She had been there since 2014. Twelve years inside a mud-brick home in a remote Pakistani town, cut off from the world, from family, from any pathway out.
Her children, five of them grew up in those walls. The three youngest had never been to school. Not once. When Pakistani police finally raided the property in Bara, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, they found Sylvie Yasmina and her children in a cramped, dilapidated room, covered in bruises.
The rescue happened not because authorities discovered the family on their own, but because one of Yasmina’s sons found a way out of the house and walked to the nearest police station to ask for help.
Pakistani police confirmed Wednesday that they rescued a French woman and her five children after she told authorities she had been held captive by her husband for more than a decade and subjected to years of domestic abuse in the country’s northwest.
The woman, identified as 54-year-old Sylvie Yasmina, was rescued from a mud-brick home in Bara, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the Afghan border.
District police chief Waqar Ahmad said Yasmina’s husband, Ahmad Khan, had been arrested and investigations are underway.
Khan has not made any public statement through an attorney, and the investigation is ongoing. These are allegations at this stage, and the case will proceed through Pakistan’s legal system.
How the Family Came to Be in Pakistan
The story of how Sylvie Yasmina and her children ended up in a remote corner of Pakistan begins more than two decades ago. Authorities said that Ahmad Khan was illegally residing in Australia when he met Yasmina.
The couple married in 2003 and lived in Australia until 2014, before relocating to Pakistan with their two older children. Three more children were born after the family arrived in Pakistan.
What exactly prompted the move is not clear from the available police record, but Yasmina’s account of what happened after the family arrived in Bara is unambiguous. Yasmina told investigators she had been unable to live freely since moving to Pakistan in 2014.
In a video recorded by police and shared with the media, Yasmina described what those years had been like in her own words. She did not speak in abstract terms.
“I arrived in Bara in 2014 and I went through very difficult circumstances with my own family,” she told Pakistani media outlets. In a separate written statement provided to police, she detailed the nature of what she says she endured.
“We were deprived of our freedom, my husband didn’t take care of us the way he should as a husband and the father of my children. He beat us and put pressure on our lives on a daily basis,” Yasmina wrote in her statement to police. “I felt that my future was already ruined, the future of the children would also be ruined.”
According to police, Yasmina in her initial statement alleged tha