A single mother’s determined effort bore fruit after three years of yearning and pining for her children. Loh Siew Hong finally met her children on 14 February for the first time after three years of cruel denial! At last, her long search for them ended.

But alas, she was given just one hour to meet up with her children at the police station. Why only one hour, you may ask. The rationale for this was not clarified or explained. It was the typical high-handed decision that made no sense.

Here was a mother who had not seen her children for three long years and yet there was no compassion or sympathy for the lonely mother. It was solely a religion-based decision to deny any opportunity for bonding with the Hindu mother and her three children, who had been surreptitiously converted to Islam without the mother’s knowledge or consent.

This took place when her abusive and violent husband abducted the children without her knowledge when she was hospitalised and recuperating, and he unilaterally converted them to Islam by lying that he did not know about the whereabouts of his wife. The children were converted to Islam through an evil deed and a lie perpetrated by the Hindu husband.

To compound complications, the religious authorities did not bother to conduct a search to find the mother. They just did not care. They were just happy to convert the children who were in their tender years.

The twin girls were about 11 and the boy was seven – not mature enough to choose a faith and too young to renounce the religion they were born into for no apparent reason. They were just caught in a situation where the father was able to exploit them and took undue advantage of their innocence.