“Operation Hope” will atmosphere on CNN International on Saturday, Dec 8 during 0900 GMT and 2000 GMT. It will also atmosphere Sunday, Dec 9 during 0200 GMT and 1000 GMT; and Monday, Dec 10 during 0300 GMT. Once it has aired we will be means to watch it in full on this page.
(CNN) — “You can’t die! You can’t die!” a father mumbles to a bloodied, lame child who lies comatose on his lap.
His hands press down on a boy’s slashed-open stomach to keep a bulb from spilling out. He sobs convulsively.
“Listen to me! You can’t die!” he repeats his dim mantra. “If for zero else, to accurate justice.”
The dual are on a rickshaw headed to a sanatorium in Dhaka. It’s not a many effective proceed to ride a failing child by a cramped, undiluted streets of a Bangladeshi capital. But it’s all that a bankrupt father can afford.
Coming soon: Operation Hope
Read: A terrible lesson, how Sara Sidner found a story
Hours earlier, 4 organisation had surrounded a 7-year-old boy, firm his hands and feet and burst open his conduct with a brick. They reason him down and took a switchblade to his throat. They sliced his chest and swell in an upside down cross.
And in a final heartless act, they hacked him sideways, chopping off his penis and his right testicle.
“It’s extraordinary that he lived,” a alloy would after say. “I’m unequivocally astounded he didn’t drain to genocide before to removing to a hospital.”
This is a story of a child who not usually survived, yet is now a pivotal declare in a hearing that has forced Bangladesh to confront a vicious yet ignored use of forced begging.
It is also a story of strangers, half a universe away, who set out to uncover a child that good exists in equal magnitude as immorality — and who set off a sequence greeting of affability to make him whole again.
For his safety, CNN has selected to secrete a boy’s genuine name.
For his resiliency, we will call him “Okkhoy” — a Bengali word for “unbreakable.”
‘Pure evil’
It is now roughly dual years later. Deep scars still crisscross Okkhoy’s thin body.
He is fearful to go out after dark. When nap finally comes, he wakes adult screaming. “Hush, hush,” his father — whom we are pursuit “Abed” — reassures him. “As prolonged as I’m here, a demon can’t get to we again.”
The conflict took place in late 2010, usually a few days before a Muslim festival of Eid. Three area kids lured Okkhoy out of his home with a guarantee of a popsicle.
“They kept insisting that we go down to this one area,” Okkhoy recounts. “I kept saying, ‘Why?’”
His suspicions aroused, Okkhoy says he set off for home when a organisation of area organisation grabbed him and pulled him into an alley.
“They tied me adult and told me they’d force me to beg,” he says. “I told them, ‘I know any and any one of you. And I’m going to tell my father.’”
That’s when one of a organisation grabbed a section and struck him conflicting a head, he says.
He fell to a belligerent and, mercifully, mislaid consciousness. Because what followed was even worse — an act that authorities dubbed “pure evil.”
“This small child who has his whole destiny forward of him, they all yet killed him,” says Mohammed Sohail, a commander with Bangladesh’s chosen anti-crime unit, a Rapid Action Battalion. “They suspicion he was gone. Dead.”
The enemy left Okkhoy by a side of a warehouse, intending to come behind after and dump him in a river.
His mother, who had left looking for her blank child, found him.
“I hardly famous him; he was so stained with blood,” she remembers.
With any unit of appetite she could muster, a excitable mom carried Okkhoy’s baggy physique to a side of a categorical road. “Who killed my baby? Who killed my baby?” she wailed.
Abed, alerted by a neighbor, rushed to a stage — and a bloody sight.
“It felt like a sky fell on me,” he says. “As a father, there is no larger pain in a universe than meaningful that we could not strengthen your child.”
Okkhoy spent 3 months in a Dhaka hospital, where doctors stitched adult his wounds. But they were incompetent to do many to correct a severed organ.
A inhuman practice
For many Westerners, a emanate of forced vagrant was bearing into a spotlight in a 2008 Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” in that a child in Mumbai, India, is intentionally blinded so he could pierce in some-more income in alms.
But a existence and superiority of “beggar mafias” is an open tip in South Asian countries.
Pity pays.
So, a gangs kidnap and ravage children — meaningful sensitive passersby are some-more expected to be overwhelmed by, and give to, a limbless child.
Almost half of Bangladesh’s 150 million people live on reduction than a dollar a day. The economy has slowed; misery is skyrocketing.
And any new day brings a uninformed collection of sun-caked boys and girls who daub on automobile windows to lift courtesy to their discolouration — a unfortunate proceed to survive.
The U.S. State Department, in a 2012 Trafficking in Persons report, cited forced vagrant as one of a areas where Bangladesh needs to rise a extensive proceed of impediment and prosecution.
Begging is criminialized in a republic — during slightest in a penal code. And a three-year jail tenure awaits anyone reason forcing someone to beg.
But coercion is messy and for now, a ring masters in this vicious stadium sojourn above a law.
A republic outraged
Okkhoy’s box would have left neglected were it not for his father’s possibility assembly with a tellurian rights lawyer, Alena Khan.
When Abed went to a military to news a attack, he was told a box was already in a books.
Someone who identified himself as a boy’s uncle had told military that Okkhoy was assaulted by dual boys in a stadium squabble that incited ugly.
Read and watch Sara Sidner’s news on a conflict from May 2011
“Two small boys are means of such brutality? And we trust that?” a dubious father asked.
“Yes, now let us do a job,” he was told and dismissed.
Undeterred, Abed motionless to interest to a judge. But there, too, he was told to let a military hoop a matter.
In a building that day was Khan who, as owner of Bangladesh Human Rights Foundation, has finished a career of upsetting a hire quo.
When a university tyro was tortured to genocide in military custody, she represented a family. When officers raped a lady and damaged evidence, she dragged them to court. And when a high-ranking military central sole orphaned children from his home, she cumulative his conviction.
“I saw a father hire there helplessly before a judge, and we kept meditative that there’s a child who has been damaged over repair,” she recalls.
Khan motionless a initial thing a box indispensable was attention, and she contacted a internal radio station.
“No child should go by this,” she says.
The response from an angry republic was immediate.
The high probity asked authorities to launch an inquiry.
And within days, a Rapid Action Battalion dull adult 5 suspects and charged them with attempted murder.
“The child started arguing with us and we strike him on his conduct with a brick,” pronounced one of a organisation in a televised confession.
In a chilling monotone, he recounted a assault, fixing any of a attackers.
“After we strike him on a head, he fell to a ground. Then (one of a men) pronounced to cut off his penis, and we cut it off. After that, (someone else) cut his chest and belly. Then (a third person) reason his conduct and cut his throat.”
Why did they aim Okkhoy?
It was payback, his father says.
Abed had gotten into an evidence with one of a organisation during a tea stall.
“He pronounced to me, ‘Just we wait and see. we will take your son and make him work for me.’”
Authorities continue to demeanour for 4 others who they contend are partial of a same gang. To safeguard Okkhoy and his family stay safe, they were placed in a corps compound.
“As prolonged as it has a venom, a lizard will always attack,” Abed says. “Who knows how many other children this squad did this to? Because we’re a family that unmasked them, they will always wish to destroy us.”
A elementary e-mail
Among a networks that aired Okkhoy’s story was CNN. And among those examination it was a businessman some 8,000 miles divided in Columbus, Ohio, named Aram Kovach.
“Usually we see something terrible on TV and we go, ‘Oh goodness, that’s horrible.’ But afterwards we pierce on,” Kovach says.
But this story, he says, “kept removing gradually worse and worse and worse.”
“You got to a end, and we was like, ‘All right, this is unbelievable. We have got to assistance this kid. We have got to do something.’”
By his possess admission, Kovach has had a gentle life.
His father was a chief physicist in Yugoslavia, so sought after that a U.S. supervision handed a family a immigration papers in an pouch while they were vacationing by a Adriatic Sea, and whisked them by craft to a States.
“I was 12 afterwards and we wrote to my friends, ‘You have to come to America,’” he remembers. “We came like royalty, like stone stars. we had no suspicion that’s not a knowledge of many people.”
Today, Kovach’s association creates record for clients perplexing to debonair adult their e-commerce participation — and he creates a decent vital doing so.
He has always wanted to get concerned in hospitality yet always suspicion he indispensable to be serve along in his career.
“I review about a Warren Buffetts and a Bill Gates who have millions and millions of dollars, and we always felt like when we get to that indicate — when we have so many income we don’t know what to do with myself — that’s when we am going to act.”
A few days later, Kovach dismissed off a elementary e-mail to CNN.
“I was so changed by this story that for several days now we can’t seem to get it out of my head,” it said. “My mom and we would like to somehow assistance his family and their small boy.”
Five mins of radio was about to change a lives of dual families.
Unanswered questions
Urologists in Bangladesh had finished their best to safety a boy’s urethra, a tube by that we urinate. They gimlet a small hole so Okkhoy could mount adult and soothe himself.
But what he indispensable was a penis.
The medicine is a specialized one, taken in Bangladesh.
“He needs to demeanour like a child again,” Khan says. “The psychological recovering can usually come after a earthy healing.”
But there were so many unanswered questions: Will a supervision let a child out of protecting control to fly for such a surgery? Where would he go? Who would line adult a surgeons? And even if it all worked out, how many would it cost?
There were times when Kovach’s wife, Branka, disturbed either they were in over their heads.
“I started doing a numbers. ‘Maybe we can get 150 people to give $100 dollars each,’ we think. Then we think, ‘Well, not everybody is going to give $100. Let’s see if they give $50.’ And all of a sudden, we need to ask 300 people. And it’s like, we don’t even know if we know 300 people.”
But they had their minds finished up.
“I have kind of an inherited innocence about me where we trust anything is possible,” Kovach says.
Months passed.
A disturbed father
Inside a Rapid Action Battalion devalue where Okkhoy and his family lives, a small child passes his days kicking around a scruffy soccer ball. He rides about in a precarious hand-me-down bicycle. At morning call, he stands during courtesy beside a soldiers.
“He visits me time to time. we also revisit him to time to time and we play together and plead many things.” Sohail, a corps commander says. “Even after such a thing happened in his life, a child is still laughing.”
But a family, says Okkhoy’s father, is irrevocably torn.
Before a attack, they lived in a one-room, tin-roofed shed down a parsimonious dirty alley in Kamrangirchar, a landfill-turned-slum in Dhaka that crams some-more than 400,000 residents in 3 block kilometers (1.15 block miles).
“But behind then, life was good,” Abed says. “Even if we ate one dish a day, life was good. Now there is this fear in my heart. Yes, we’re in protecting custody, Yes, they’re gripping us safe. But a fear is always there.”
The corps devalue is spacious, greener, cleaner.
Okkhoy, his father and comparison hermit live in a men’s quarters; his mom and younger sister in a women’s.
Abed says his mom spends her days in a daze, mumbling incoherently to herself. “Allah, give behind to my son what they took away,” she prays daily.
He, too, confesses to violation down when his son isn’t around.
“They damaged a lives, They damaged a family. There is no wish for us anymore,” he says.
Okkhoy has never been to school. He has a single-minded goal: He wants to join a corps — and see his enemy hanged.
“I wish to be a RAB member and zero else,” he says. “When we grow up, we wish to pierce them to justice.”
Such speak worries his father.
“My biggest fear is that he’ll start to think, ‘I will find a chairman who did this to me and we will do a same to him.’ He will live in a universe of revenge.
“I don’t wish this. we don’t wish to be a father of a terrorist.”
The pieces fit
John Gearhart is a executive of pediatric urology during Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, Maryland.
As one of a nation’s preeminent urologists, he has treated hundreds of children innate with birth defects or obscure genitalia.
If anyone could make Okkhoy whole again, he could.
So, CNN reaches out to him. And he agrees.
“You usually can’t suppose another tellurian being doing this to another tellurian being, frankly,” he says. “And even yet he is Bangladesh and I’m in Baltimore, to be means to change one child’s life is given we go into pediatrics.”
Gearhart afterwards enlists a assistance of a few other colleagues, who — like him — proffer to present their time.
With a medical group ready, a rest of a pieces fast tumble into place.
Qatar Airways offers to fly in Okkhoy for free. Staffers during a Bangladesh bureau of International Organization for Migration prepared him for what to design in a United States. And Kovach agrees to bear a rest of a family’s expenses.
“They contend angels live in heaven,” an overjoyed Abed exclaims. “These merciful souls are explanation they live among us too.”
Penile reformation medicine explained
A whinging question
It’s late afternoon when father and son, accompanied by their court-appointed defender Alena Khan, fly into Dulles International Airport. It’ll take another hour in rush-hour Friday trade to arrive during a townhouse nearby a Baltimore sanatorium where a family will live for a subsequent month.
“You’ve been on a minds for about a year or so. So, I’m blissful to accommodate we and I’m blissful that we are here,” Kovach says when Okkhoy arrives.
Real life infrequently does not live adult to a movies.
There are no scenes of an gladdened Okkhoy regulating adult and bearhugging Kovach. He is gay during a container full of toys a businessman has brought for him, yet he is sleepy and jetlagged to uncover it.
His father, too, is sap from a 17-hour moody — and heedful about these strangers’ motivations.
The subsequent day, as a Kovachs’ take a family sightseeing, Abed decides to ask a doubt that has gnawed during him.
“I have usually one question: Why are we doing this for us?” he asks in Bengali.
“Because we adore him,” Kovach says by a translator. “I felt his grief, we felt his pain and we usually wanted to do something. we mean, if it was me, we was anticipating somebody else would do a same thing for me.”
As he speaks, Abed sensitively listens. Tears good in his eyes.
“Thank you, appreciate you,” he says in damaged English.
The dual organisation hug.
“It’s usually what we do,” Kovach says. “It’s usually what we do as tellurian beings.”
Tears dusty and a tragedy resolved, Abed relaxes and enjoys a day with his son.
They’ve been by a lot — and a lot some-more lies ahead.
Devastating news
For a child who spent 3 months in a hospital, Okkhoy is surprisingly during palliate during a Children’s Center.
He is struck by a contrast. It is clean, colorful, still — a conflicting of a soil and a stink of a medical trickery he has been to.
“My heart is whipping like a butterfly,” he says.
For his father, a vicinity meant small if a medicine isn’t successful. And he has a definite magnitude for success: Will my son be means to bear children?
During a pre-surgery consultations, he poses a same doubt over and over to any doctor.
And any query is met with a same rhythmical response: That’s a good unknown.
“We’ve seen immature organisation entrance behind from Iraq who’ve been harmed with rocket-propelled grenades and other things some-more serious than this,” Gearhart says. “But usually as distant as an damage committed by one chairman opposite another, to a child, this is a many serious genital damage that I’ve ever seen in 23 years of doing this.”
He admits a medicine won’t be easy.
“This is an operation that is not in a book anywhere,” he says. “We’ll arrange of rise this operation as we go along.”
He’s enlisted a assistance of dual other doctors: Dr. Richard Redett, a pediatric cosmetic surgeon; and Dr. Dylan Stewart, a pediatric mishap surgeon.
The doctors devise to take hankie from Okkhoy’s forearm — between his bend and wrist — and refurbish it into a figure of a penis. They will afterwards transplant it down to a groin.
It’ll demeanour like a normal penis, Redett says — yet it won’t be entirely functional. The sanatorium MRIs have suggested a conflict has left small penile hankie around a injury.
“The bad thing about a operation is he won’t be means to get an construction though carrying something put in there when he is older,” Redett explains.
The information is translated.
Shocked and in disbelief, Abed asks a alloy to repeat himself. He wants to make certain he understands accurately what a alloy said.
“When he’s of age and he’s prepared to start a family, what did we contend he will need?” he asks.
The child will have to be flown behind to a United States, Redett says, so that doctors can put in an make that will concede him to have an erection.
And even after that, he adds, Okkhoy will need a assistance of a flood alloy to successfully procreate.
The news devastates Abed.
He had hoped this outing to Johns Hopkins would make all okay, given so many of Okkhoy’s life isn’t.
Abed, a rickshaw puller, sole his rickshaw and his home to compensate for his son’s medical diagnosis in Dhaka. His family is in hiding. He is in debt.
He knows there will be no lapse trip. Reality won’t concede it.
When a family earnings to a townhouse, Abed lets loose.
“Plastic surgery? Plastic surgery? We came all a proceed here for a cosmetic medicine that won’t repair anything?” he testily asks Khan, a tellurian rights lawyer.
Khan ponders for a notation what to say. What can presumably make adult for a father’s dashed expectations?
“Have faith in God,” she finally says. “God has grand designs for your son.”
A hearing awaits
Back home, a formidable hearing awaits — one in that Okkhoy will eventually have to take a mount and relive, second by agonizing second, what was finished to him.
“We wish that there will be some suitable punishment,” says Sohail, a corps commander. “An model punishment for these criminals so that a rest of a republic knows.”
The gang, according to corps officials, has maimed during slightest 5 other children — all of them around Okkhoy’s age.
One of a organisation who confessed told investigators how a squad kept a kids cramped for months in parsimonious spaces or even in barrels and deprived them of food.
Then they’d send them out to beg.
Each child would pierce behind a homogeneous of about $7 a day. The squad kept all yet 25 cents of any haul.
The kids perceived small pennies to feed themselves.
Were it not for Okkhoy, a craving would lift on.
“He’s a usually witness, a usually declare who saw all with his possess eyes,” Sohail says. “Without his statement, though him testifying in court, a box can’t be won.”
Okkhoy’s testimony is essential for another reason.
The corps has a repute for coercing confessions, and tellurian rights groups have prolonged indicted it of heavy-handedness in dispensing justice.
The U.S. State Department’s latest news on tellurian rights in Bangladesh credit a corps of regulating “unwarranted fatal force,” and a supervision of self-denial total on how many extrajudicial killings it has committed.
Sohail, a corps commander, sees it differently.
“The tellurian rights activists and a character of work might be opposite yet a idea is a same: to strengthen a tellurian rights of trusting victims,” he says.
The large day
It’s a morning of a surgery, and Okkhoy is adult before a sun. If he’s nervous, he doesn’t uncover it.
He creates faces during a staff, and tries to stir them with a English he’s schooled given nearing 6 days ago. “1, 2, 3, 4,” he counts, holding adult his fingers.
It amazes everybody who meets him.
“For a child who’s been by this kind of trauma, and seen this many doctors, we can’t trust he’s not frightened of hospitals, he’s not frightened of doctors,” Gearhart says.
As he is wheeled into a handling room, Okkhoy flashes a thumbs up.
As he is laid on a table, he chants, “Go, let’s go!”
“Be brave,” his father urges. “Don’t be worried.”
“I’m not,” he replies. “I have no fear!”
Beep, beep, beep, a machines whir.
It’s 9 a.m. and a group of doctors and nurses are scheming for a difficult operation that could take 8 to 10 hours.
Outside, Abed paces behind and forth, his arms crossed behind him, his conduct bowed.
It is a second time he has had to see his son in a sanatorium and he is clearly nervous.
He calls his mom behind in Bangladesh.
“The medicine will go on all night,” he tells her. “Get a megaphone and tell a whole area to urge for him. It is now in God’s hands.”
He checks his watch. It’s usually 9:05 a.m.
Beep, beep, beep.
Inside a OR, Gearhart readies to make a initial incision.
What a doctors are anticipating is that Okkhoy was left with adequate of his possess penile tissue, dark inside his body, that they can lift out.
The tests they did progressing in a week advise there isn’t. But MRIs have been wrong before.
Everything now rests on what Gearhart finds.
“So, let’s have a look,” he says.
A few brief mins go by.
Gearhart: “I’ll tell you, Rick, I’m removing a small some-more encouraged, we know? we unequivocally am.”
Redett: “The good thing is, it’s sensate too.”
Gearhart: “It’s sensate, absolutely! The good Lord finished this one sensate…. Can we have a ruler? Yeah! Good for him. Good for him!”
Exactly 34 mins after he walked into a handling room, Gearhart walks out — and heads true for a watchful room.
“So we have some smashing news. Wonderful news,” he begins.
In males, partial of a penis is reason inside a body, tucked adult inside a pelvis and trustworthy to a pubic bone. Think of a tree where we usually see a partial above ground; not a base dark below.
Read more: Penile medicine explained
“After we took all a injure hankie divided and after we took all a skin away, we indeed found that there is a reasonable volume of penis down, submerged underneath a skin, underneath a scar, that’s usable,” Gearhart says.
“So, therefore, we’re not going to have to make him a new penis.”
The doctors also found they would be means to pierce a urethra — a tube used for urination — to a tip of Okkhoy’s penis. Translation: He will no longer have to soothe himself from a small hole a doctors in Bangladesh bore.
“Oh really good news! Very good news!” Abed exclaims.
Abed shortly learns there are even some-more reasons to celebrate.
The penile hankie is “sensate,” definition Okkhoy will be means to have sensations and erections. And a hankie will means his penis to grow as Okkhoy grows.
Abed can’t reason behind tears.
“Hey Allah,” he sighs with relief, thanking God.
Khan too cries. She’s been by a family’s side for some-more than a year now, fighting for Okkhoy.
“All these months, all a worry. All this has borne fruit,” she says.
Instead of 10 hours on a handling table, a medicine takes reduction than three.
Redett’s group uses skin from Okkhoy’s thigh for a missile of a penis and hankie from his middle impertinence backing to emanate a glans, or tip.
“It couldn’t have left better,” he after says. “Absolute best solution. “
A earnest future?
Children are resilient, so Okkhoy’s liberation is quick.
He is liberated from a sanatorium reduction than a week after a surgery, yet needs to sojourn in a area for 3 some-more weeks so doctors can guard him for infections.
He is limited from earthy activity — that means, he can’t flog his dear soccer round around.
That leaves Okkhoy though an forgive when Khan sits him down to mentor him from a design book of alphabets.
“A. B. C. D,” Khan points to a letters and reads aloud.
“A, B, Chi …,” Okkhoy repeats.
“Not Chi. Say ‘C,’” she corrects him.
Khan wants Okkhoy to be a initial chairman in his family to get an education.
“The dream we have for him is that he grows adult and devotes his life to a use of people,” she says. “That he sees to it that no one goes by what he went through.”
It is a dream Kovach and his mom share as well. The dual wish to set adult a account to assistance make Okkhoy’s drill possible.
Before he leaves Baltimore, Okkhoy is asked again what he wants to be when he grows up.
Until now, his answer had been a same: a member of a Rapid Action Battalion to revenge his attack.
Not this time.
“I wish to turn a doctor,” he says though blank a beat, “because we wish to save people. “And when we do, we won’t take any income from them.”
A sanatorium staffer suggests that maybe one day Okkhoy could come work as a surgeon during Johns Hopkins.
“Wouldn’t that be a miracle?” she says.
“This story is full of miracles,” Okkhoy’s father responds.
Who’s to contend there won’t be another one?
