Niagara police have concluded an Amber Alert for a missing nine-year-old girl; however they will continue looking for her, classifying the search as a missing persons case.
Police first issued the alert for Layla Sabry on Friday night and the broadcast order ended at around 3 a.m. on Saturday, as per protocol.
“The Amber Alert is not cancelled. What happened is the broadcast gets cancelled automatically after five hours,” Staff Sgt. Paul Rogers told CP24. “We are still actively looking for this young lady and her mother. There is a court order that we will be enforcing to apprehend the child for now and sort all of this out.”
Police have said that Sabry was last seen with her mother in the Welland area on Thursday evening and has not been seen since.
Rogers said that Sabry’s parents are both from out of the country. He said that police are not concerned for the girl’s safety at this point.
“We just need to have all of this sorted out. She’s with her mother and we have no reason to believe that she wouldn’t be safe,” he said. “She’s a loving mother and we are hoping we can bring this to a resolve very quickly.”
Police have said they are operating under a court order to return Sabry to her father; however Rogers says there is a chance that the child’s mother may not even be aware of that court order.
“She may be of the assumption that there is nothing that she is even doing wrong,” he said.
On Saturday afternoon, police tweeted that the Amber Alert had been formally cancelled and would now be handled as a missing persons case.
