The Sunday Times' Marie Colvin has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy radical, using the base of terrorist group Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind the slave-trade in boys who are as young as six-years old.

The children are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and garner about $2000 each from slaveowners who use them as servants or in the sex trade. The Christian children live lives of misery and brutality at the hands of their Muslim owners.

Surprisingly, it was American and Pakistani Christian missionaries who took action against Khan. The terrorist and slave-trader was exposed in a sting operation organized by the missionaries who planned to save 20 kidnapped boys and return them to their homes.

Using a hidden camera, they captured him on film accepting $28,500 from a Pakistani missionary posing as a businessman who told Khan he wanted buy the boys in order to set up an operation in which the children would beg for money on the streets of Pakistan.

Khan was observed driving from the meeting with a knapsack full of cash to the JUD headquarters.

Intelligence experts believe that of a necessity Khan became involved in slavery in order to continue terrorist operations in Pakistan. His base was originally funded by Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, in the late 1990s and the JUD’s assets were frozen last month by the US Treasury Department after Khan's group was designated a terrorist organization.

The US State Department declared the JUD a front for another organization, Lashkar-i-Toiba, a terrorist group banned in Pakistan which joined with Al-Qaeda in an attempt to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf in 2003.

Khan, who regularly stays at the JUD’s base, broke his promise to hand over the 20 boys on receipt of the cash and took the Pakistani missionary's assistant hostage while he checked that the dollars were genuine. The children were eventually freed in a beaten and malnourished condition after being locked in a room for five months during which they suffered frequent assaults.

The undercover American and Pakistani missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, but so far Khan remains at-large.

Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, the JUD's top leader, incited riots in Pakistan this past year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

Khan lives near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, but when in the Punjab he stays at the JUD’s headquarters where young men can be seen practicing martial arts with batons. The compound is patrolled by guards with automatic firearms.

The JUD, which boasts of providing aid to the poor, says that it has created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke that is superior to western “depravity.” "Khan's activities explode that myth. He planned to sell his young captives to the highest bidder, whether into domestic servitude or the sex trade. The boys knew only that they were for sale," said Marie Colvin of the Times of London.

Most media organizations throughout the world, including in the US, have failed to adequately cover this story. Media critics believe there is little interest by reporters because the victims happen to be Christians. One intelligence expert claims that had this been a case of Christians mistreating Muslims, the story would be plastered on the frontpages of the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today.

Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police and he's a staff writer for the New Media Alliance (thenma.org).