Lina Khil first went missing from the Villas Del Cabo apartments on the city’s Northwest side on Dec. 20, 2021. Credit: Courtesy Photo / San Antonio Police Department

The father of Lina Khil, the San Antonio girl that disappeared more than a year ago at age 3, has agreed to take a polygraph test, as first reported by Fox 29 and News4SA on Thursday.

Khil, an Afghan refugee, disappeared from a playground near Northwest San Antonio’s Villas Del Cabo apartments during the afternoon of Dec. 20, 2021. San Antonio police invited her parents to take a polygraph test in the early months of the investigation, the Express-News reports. However, they declined due to their “fragile mental state.”

That’s now changed.

“I am agreeing to do the polygraph test because, in our community, the American community and San Antonio, people think I have done something to Lina,” the girl’s father, Riaz Sardar Khil, told KENS 5 this week via a translator.

Lina’s father’s polygraph test was initially slated for April 25 but has been rescheduled as police search for a Pashto-to-English translator, the daily reports.

Also known as a “lie detector test,” a polygraph test attempts to note whether someone is being truthful by monitoring the suspect’s heart rate, among other physical clues associated with lying.

Even so, experts have questioned the accuracy of polygraph tests for years, and evidence from them is not admissible in Texas courts.

The update in the Khil case is just the latest twist in a disappearance that’s grabbed national headlines. The search for the girl has spanned as far north as the Hill Country and was even the subject of a true crime TV show late last year.

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This article appears in Apr 19 – May 2, 2023.

Michael Karlis is a multimedia journalist at the San Antonio Current, whose coverage in print and on social media focuses on local and state politics. He is a graduate of American University in Washington,...