MULTAN, Aug 30: Tenants of Okara military farms vowed on Friday at the memorial service of Suleman Masih to carry on their peaceful struggle for proprietary rights.

Defying pickets manned by the rangers and police, hundreds of tenants of various villages of Okara military farms gathered at Chak 10/4L to attend the service.

Tenants’ leaders from other state-managed agricultural and livestock farms of the province also managed to sneak into Chak 10/4L to pay homage to the deceased whom they were calling a ‘martyr’ as he had proved that the tenants “now have to choose between proprietary rights or death.”

Top priests of Catholic church including Bishop Andrew Fransis of the Multan diocese and Bishop Joseph Coots of Faisalabad were also present at the service. In his speech, Coots supported the tenants’ struggle for ownership rights, terming their demand just after having cultivated the land for nearly a century, generation after generation.

Suleman’s tortured and bullet-riddled body was handed over to his family by the police on Aug 25 last and the rangers authorities stressed for its burial without fulfilling the legal formalities, including autopsy.

At that time the bereaved family succumbed to the pressure but now it has moved the Lahore High Court for exhuming the body to for autopsy.

The rangers, however, said the Anjuman Mazareen leadership had killed Suleman to exploit his death to meet its ends. Okara cantonment police, therefore, registered a case 204/2002 under sections 324/353, 148/149 and 186/506 on the report of an inspector of rangers, Saleem Afaridi, against some 75 nominated and 250 unidentified people, including AMP leaders, women and children.

Among the nominated accused, seven are said to have been died long before. They are: Rehmat Ali, Jattu, Muhammad Tufail, Ali, Naik Muhammad, Dr Sikander and Nizam Din.

Besides, the law enforcers also arrested six of the tenants who were injured by their (police and rangers’) firing on Aug 24 last and were hospitalised. Three of them — Akram, Jamil and Ghulam Rasool—were shifted to Sahiwal Central Jail on Thursday last. However, Akram of Chak 4/4L had to be admitted again to the Okara DHQ hospital for his serious condition.

Doctors at the DHQ hospital had reportedly expressed their inability to operate Imtiaz Ahmed of Chak 5/4L, one of the six injured accused, due to his critical condition. It was decided on Friday to shift him to Lahore but he was still lying at the DHQ hospital at the time of filing this report because the rangers wanted to shift him under tight security and the arrangements were under way.

Challenging the official claims that the siege of the farms had been ended, Chaudhry Jabbar said police and rangers pickets could be seen at Chak 5, Passco godown, Okara bridge, Chak 9/4L, Shahdipur and Tabrook.

He said the arrests of tenants and their relatives were being carried out daily at these pickets in connection with cases registered against tenants after Aug 24.

He also contradicted the claim of a rangers spokesperson that the Okara farms were important viz-a-viz defence point of view. He said only dry milk was being processed at the Okara military farms, that too, mainly by procuring milk from open market at Rs 12 per litre.

He claimed that the per litre cost of milk fetched from the military farms was as high as Rs 26 to Rs 28. “No other commodity is supplied to cantonments from the Okara farms,” he added.