Abducted Atiya Anjum-Wilkinson returns to UK from Pakistan Three long, agonising years after Gemma Wilkinson last saw her daughter, Atiya, now six, has returned to the UK after a multinational police operation tracked her down to the Sialkot city in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province. On 6 November 2009, Wilkinson believed the three-year old was going to Southport to celebrate her birthday. She was not on good terms with Atiya's father, Razwan Anjum, but had expected him to bring the toddler back the following week. Atiya finally did return - landing at Manchester just after 7pm on Friday. Earlier, Pakistani officials confirmed the girl had set off from Islamabad airport in the afternoon. Wilkinson, accompanied by one of Anjum's brothers, travelled to Manchester airport to meet her. She never gave up hope that Atiya would return, and planned to give her the birthday presents she bought for her each year they had been apart. It seems Atiya had been living among her father's family the whole time. But not with Anjum, who has spent most of the past three years in jail in Britain after refusing to reveal her whereabouts. He always insisted he had received Gemma's permission to take Atiya on holiday to Pakistan but did not know what happened to her after he returned home without her on 20 November 2009. Manchester police long suspected her likely location, having found two addresses for Anjum's family in Sialkot. But they wasted months looking for her in Iran after her father told detectives a string of lies, according to the detective in charge of bringing her back to the UK. Detective Inspector Phil Owen from Greater Manchester police said: "We have interviewed Razwan in prison numerous times over the years and he has always refused to tell us the truth. When he told us she might have been taken to Iran, we spent a lot of time trying to get in touch with Iranian police, which is, as you can imagine, fraught with danger and difficulty. One judge who jailed Anjum for contempt said he had demonstrated the most cynical and cruel behaviour he had dealt in 30 years. Owen said a recent police appeal, which included a photofit of how Atiya might look three years after her disappearance, appeared to prick the conscience of Anjum's family in Rochdale and beyond. Secretly, we have always believed she was with family members, and recently the family realised the game was up and they had to tell us where she was. Foreign Office officials say they had raised the case with Pakistani authorities at a local and government level on several occasions over the past three years, but the Pakistanis started the rescue operation in earnest only in recent weeks. Sajjad Karim, the Conservative MEP for the north-west who chairs the European Parliament's Friends of Pakistan group, said the hunt for Atiya was stepped up in the Punjab after he raised the matter officially with the Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, at a meeting of the foreign affairs committee of the European parliament in early December. She vowed to help, saying: "We will be looking into this carefully and do whatever we can." Karim said in a phone interview on Friday that the Pakistani authorities immediately checked to see if there was any trace of Atiya in medical and school records or on airport or seaport passenger lists. They narrowed the search down to an area of north-east Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, where British police knew her father had family. Detectives from Manchester had a number of possible addresses for Anjum's relatives, said Karim, but they had not been searched after diplomats at the British high commission in Islamabad said they had neither the resources nor the jurisdiction to act. A Foreign Office spokesman said all British diplomats could do was raise the matter with the Pakistanis and press them to act where necessary. We were involved since December 2009 and worked closely with Greater Manchester police to do everything we could to bring the situation to happy conclusion. It was under jurisdiction of Pakistani authorities, and we did everything we could to encourage action by these authorities. Karim claims that after his plea to the Pakistani foreign minister, local police started making inquiries in Sialkot, a garrison town in the north of Punjab province, which has long had links with the UK. Now a hub of light industry and commerce, tens of thousands of British citizens have retained family connections with the city and its environs. Word quickly got around and members of the public tipped off police as to her whereabouts, said Karim. "It's one of those cases where people are going to have a lot of sympathy for the mother," he explained. Detectives found a new address for the father's relatives and put the house under surveillance. According to Karim, when police eventually swooped, they met no resistance. Photos of Atiya were then sent to her mother on Christmas day, he said. Karim said it was frustrating that no one had made an official approach to the Pakistani government earlier. I really, really wish I had been aware of this case three years ago. There is nothing I have done today that I couldn't have done three years ago," he said. "When there is no legal avenue available, we should always look for other avenues," he added, explaining that Britain's strong links with Pakistan, along with the EU, played a crucial role in Atiya's return. "In this case it simply meant sitting down face to face with the foreign minister and making the case," he said. Atiya's father remains in prison, having been handed a fourth consecutive jail term by a high court judge in April after refusing to reveal his daughter's whereabouts. Anne-Marie Hutchinson, a family solicitor specialising in international child abduction cases, said: "This is a highly unusual case - it is very unusual for a father to spend so long in prison. I've had other cases where the dad has sat it out in jail for maybe six months, but then they have always started to co-operate. Hutchinson said Anjum could face criminal proceedings under the 1984 Child Abduction Act. If found guilty, he could be given a maximum sentence of seven years, she said, though the time he has served for contempt might be taken into consideration. Earlier this month the Foreign Office reported the number of parental child abduction cases they dealt with had risen by 88% in less than a decade. Although child abduction is a criminal offence, proceedings demanding the return of a child are dealt with in the family courts as a civil matter.