Custody battle girl returns to Britain

• Molly with father Sajad Rana and brother Adam in 2007 Picture: Getty Images

The teenager, who moved to Lahore at the age of 12 after a highly publicised disappearance from her school on Lewis, is understood to have wanted to return to the UK permanently for some time. She flew in last week from the sub-continent with her brother Adam, 20.

Molly, also known as Misbah Rana, has spent the past four years living in the Pakistani city with her father Sajad Rana, where she attended an Islamic school.

She has not returned to Scotland but is instead staying with her 22-year-old sister Tahmina, who has also now returned to live in England with her two-year-old girl. Molly's mother Louise Fairlie, who still lives on Lewis, is staying with her two daughters following 16-year-old Molly's return.

It is understood that Molly has returned to the UK with her father's approval.

Fairlie said: "We are very happy and we are all enjoying the family life that we have got. The past is behind us and we are moving on. We would now just like to be left alone."

Molly's disappearance in 2006 caused huge international controversy when she vanished from the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway, which she had only been attending for a few days.

Her mother Louise Campbell - now Louise Fairlie - gave an emotional press conference in which she said that Molly had been abducted by her father and expressed fears that she might be forced into an arranged marriage. At the time, Fairlie was living with her partner Kenny Campbell and their six-month-old daughter in the Lewis fishing village of Tong. It was later established that Molly had been picked up by her sister Tahmina outside her school and the two had flown to Glasgow, where they had met their father and boarded a plane to Lahore.

The following day, Interpol launched a search for the missing teenager. However, when Molly was tracked down in Pakistan she insisted that her name was not Molly but Misbah, and claimed that life at her mother's council flat in Lewis had been a "living hell".

"It was my choice," she said. "I asked my sister if I could go with her. I would like to stay in Pakistan with my father."

She said she was happy to have been reunited with her sister Tahmina and brother Adam, who were also living with her father in Pakistan.

After Molly's disappearance in 2006, Fairlie launched a legal battle to get her daughter back to Scotland. Former Glasgow MP Mohammad Sarwar flew out to Pakistan to act as a mediator between the warring parties.

However, in January 2007 Fairlie reached an out-of-court settlement with her ex-husband in which the couple agreed that Molly should stay in Pakistan while allowing her mother visiting rights and regular telephone calls.

In December 2009, Fairlie - who is no longer in a relationship with Kenny Campbell, who has custody of their now four-year-old daughter Rachel - gave an interview in which she said Molly wanted to return to the UK. "I know she wants to come back to Britain," she said. "I found that out from somebody close to her who is in contact with my other children."

She also accused Rana of blocking contact with her daughter and claimed she hadn't heard from Molly in six months.

"I just keep hoping one day she will come back. There is nobody in my house any more calling me Mama," she said.

She added that her daughter had been "seduced" by her father's relatively wealthy lifestyle in Lahore, but that reality had now set in for the teenager.

"Her father dazzled her with presents and a life of luxury. I was living in a council house with no carpets and little furniture. She and her brothers are not happy - I know that.

"They want to see their mother as well as their father. To make children choose is so unfair on everybody."

Molly, Tahmina and Adam first moved to Pakistan to live with their father in 2003. However, when they returned to the UK in 2005, Fairlie applied for and won a claim for emergency custody of Molly and Adam.

The children first moved in with their mother in Stranraer. Adam later left and Molly then moved to Lewis with her mother and her then partner Kenny Campbell.