A five-year-old British boy arrived back home on Thursday after a 12-day kidnap ordeal in Pakistan which triggered an international police operation. Sahil Saeed flew into Manchester airport in northern England with his father, Raja Naqqash Saeed, with whom he was reunited in Islamabad earlier on Thursday following a ransom payment. The ordeal began when Sahil was snatched at gunpoint from his grandmother's house in the town of Jhelum, about 100km south of Islamabad, in the early hours of March 4 at the end of a family holiday.

Pakistani authorities, helped by British officials, launched a hunt for the boy, and 12 days later Sahil was recovered safe and sound in a field not far from Jhelum. His father flew back to Pakistan to collect his son and return him to Britain days after the boy's uncle dropped off a STG110,000 ($A182,542) ransom in Paris. Spanish police arrested five people in connection with the case, while French police detained two related family members suspected of being accomplices.
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