SHE looked at her father and nestled her head on his shoulder, barely able to stop herself grinning and laughing. He kissed his favourite daughter on the cheek and put a gentle arm around her.

Sitting side-by-side yesterday with the man accused of abducting her and trying to force her into a marriage with a Muslim twice her age, Molly Campbell, the 12-year-old girl whose disappearance from outside her school in Scotland led to an international police inquiry, dispelled any lingering doubts about why she had left.

Speaking publicly for the first time since she vanished from Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides last Friday, she denied that her father was planning to force her into an arranged marriage and said that she had begged him to take her away from her mother.

Dressed in a black salwar kameez as she defied her mother’s pleas not to speak to the press, the schoolgirl announced that she no longer wanted to be known as Molly Campbell. “My name isn’t Molly, it’s Misbah,” she said, referring to her original full Islamic name of Misbah Iram Ahmed Rana.

Her appearance before cameras in the Pakistani city of Lahore, 5,000 miles from where she had been living with her mother in Scotland, follows a week of deepening mystery about her disappearance and claims that she had been kidnapped by her father.

Sajad Ahmed Rana had been described as “a pig” by relatives of Misbah’s mother, who claimed that he had stalked her outside her school after hiring private detectives to follow her movements. Just minutes after speaking to her mother by telephone, Misbah said that she wanted to live with her father and two of her siblings in Lahore, where Mr Rana owns a large 15-room house in one of the city’s exclusive suburbs.

The house she now calls home with her father is a world away from the council house she shared with her mother until last weekend.

Model Town is an enclave of wealth, where luxurious villas are surrounded by high stone walls and watched over by armed guards.

It is in stark contrast to Tong, the village on the Isle of Lewis where Misbah has been living with her mother for the past eight months.

Lewis is certainly a beautiful island, famous for its sweeping beaches, stunning views and a relaxed pace of life. But home for Molly and her mother, Louise, was on a scruffy council estate on the edge of Stornoway, the island’s main town.

The cul-de-sac of 24 semidetached bungalows is unkempt and unfriendly, where dogs bark around the clock and rusting cars are left in overgrown back gardens.

Even the beautiful beach below where Molly was said to have enjoyed long walks and collecting sea shells was apparently tainted: according to locals, the sinking sand is so bad that few go down there.

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