This article has been updated.
More than two years after she went missing, a tip on Thursday sent local and federal authorities on a search for Afghan refugee Lina Khil near where the 3-year-old disappeared on San Antonio’s North Side.
The search could take days as police look into possible evidence, the Khil family said.
At the scene — roughly one-half mile from where the girl disappeared from a playground in December 2021 — San Antonio Police Department spokesman Ricardo Guzman said the tip suggested officials could find evidence connected to the case in a particular “wooded area within a greenway” behind The Helix apartment complex on Bluemel Road, not far from the South Texas Medical Center.
The area has been searched several times since Lina’s disappearance, Guzman said, but the new tip set off a renewed search. SAPD detectives, at least one K-9, the SAPD Crime Scene Investigations Unit and the FBI searched the area on Thursday.
“The tip could be resulted in finding Lina Khil,” Guzman said.
The tip came from an inmate at the Bexar County Jail, a family advocate for Khil’s family said Friday.
As of Thursday afternoon, no evidence had been found, although FBI detectives at one point appeared to remove a long object from a shed before wrapping the structure with caution tape.
A two-day search for Lina in January 2022 ended without “conclusive findings,” and her Amber Alert was discontinued days later.
Officials were waiting Thursday for sonar X-ray technology to arrive, said Pamela Allen, the Khil family’s advocate and CEO of Eagles Flight Advocacy & Outreach, a nonprofit that helps refugees and families find resources in San Antonio. The Khil family came to the United States from Afghanistan in 2019.
SAPD investigators told the Khil family the department had been at the scene since Wednesday night, and that they are currently waiting for the additional equipment “to see what’s under the dirt.”
SAPD confirmed that “they are looking for a body,” Allen said.
Two SAPD investigators and one FBI investigator also told the family next steps include cutting down trees to make space for excavating equipment.
“Everybody is shaken,” Allen said Friday. “We don’t know what this prisoner’s relation is to this case, so this is the scary part.”
From the other side of the greenway, Lina’s father, Riaz Khil, watched the search with Allen and translator Lawang Marigal. More apartment residents walked outside with family members, curiously watching, trying to figure out what was going on.
Allen said the search began hours after a Wednesday afternoon meeting that SAPD held with the Khil family.
“It was a meeting that SAPD reached out to the family for, because they had heard concerns of Riaz, Lina’s father, about the communication,” Allen said, adding it may have been connected to a public statement Riaz Khil made about SAPD’s communication with his family.
“We wondered if [the search] had anything to do with the meeting yesterday,” she added. “It has been very frustrating. They feel the communication has not been forthcoming. The meeting yesterday was to clear the air and try to get some more answers.”
The little girl’s birthday is coming up, she added.
“February 20, Lina will be turning 6. Dad is very frustrated, the family is very saddened by the fact she has been missing for two years,” Allen said.
