subject: Freida Pinto Hollywood Actress | Sexy Freida Pinto [print this page] Freida Pinto Hollywood Actress | Sexy Freida Pinto
Past the shops selling mutton and electrical goods, past the children playing on the train tracks and the goats munching quietly on cauliflower leaves, Rafiq Qureshi sits in a dwelling constructed from asbestos sheeting. The place is airless - the power gone - and outside an open gutter gushes with purple dye. People peek in curiously. Qureshi cuts an unhappy figure: unshaven, sleepless, anxious. It has been a difficult week, in which he has moved from the slums, to the newspaper front pages, to the police station. Now he is back where he started.
Qureshi is the father of Rubina Ali - the child actor who starred as the young Latika in Slumdog Millionaire - and last Sunday he was the unlikely subject of the latest sting by News of the World investigative reporter Mazher Mahmood. This is the man who exposed drug-taking by DJs Johnnie Walker and Richard Bacon, and who led to Sophie, Countess of Wessex, giving up her PR job in 2002, after she was recorded saying that, among other fairly strident views, she considered William Hague "deformed". In an extensive article, Mahmood wrote that he had heard that Qureshi would consider "the highest offer for his child", and that the newspaper had then decided to approach him, masquerading as "a wealthy Arab princess from Dubai and the middle man negotiating for her". Suggesting that the husband of the "princess" was an Arab sheik who wanted to adopt Rubina and take her to live with him, Mahmood wrote that Qureshi had agreed to sell his daughter for 200,000.
The fallout from the story was quick and brutal. With the world's media descending on Garib Nagar - "the city of the poor" - where Qureshi and his family live, cameras caught Rubina's estranged mother, Khurshida, and her stepmother, Munni, grappling, tugging each other's hair, hands reaching for each other's throats. Khurshida also reported her former husband to the police, leading to him first being questioned, then released without charge.
