KARACHI: 18-month long ordeal of mother to get son freed
By Tahir Siddiqui
KARACHI, Feb 10: A 45-year-old woman, Reshman, has secured the release of her young son after spending more than 18 months on a garbage dump outside the Karachi Central Prison. Muzammil, 18, was released from the prison on Monday.
Reshman, once a small time actress of Pushto films later married a Baloch from Lyari, decided to make the garbage dump her home five months after Muzammil was arrested by the Mochko police on Jan 8, 2004. Three days after his arrest he was charged with “intent to commit robbery”. He was later booked in three other cases, including two previous robberies and possession of an unlicensed pistol.
The police apparently failed to inform Muzammil’s family about his arrest. Reshman said she searched for her son for five months. Finally she approached the Central Prison on a Sunday morning.
She says she is beholden to a prison guard, Arshad, who helped her locate her son in the jail.
“He told me that since it was Sunday, he wouldn’t be able to make inquiries to see if my son was in the jail. He asked me to come back the next day.” Instead of going back to her home in the Mochko area, Reshman decided to spend the night near the jail. “The garbage dump appeared a more convenient place at the time,” she says.
The next morning, Arshad helped locate Muzammil, then only 16, among the prisoners, and arranged a meeting between the mother and the son. “Muzammil seemed totally run down. He said he couldn’t bear the life in jail any longer and often considered committing suicide,” said Reshman. “I told him to hold on, and promised him that I won’t go home until his release.”
Reshman never went home after that, and made the garbage dump a permanent home for herself and her three sons aged 15, 11 and 10 at the time.
“It was a difficult time. I lived by the charity of the passersby, some of whom would give us money or food. We were often harassed by the police who would tell us to move away from that place, but I would tell them that I had nowhere else to go to,” she said.
This was also true, she said, because ever since her decision to put up outside the jail, her angry husband appropriated her house and sold it off. “I could not fight on too many fronts, so I did not pursue that matter,” she said.
In the meantime, her search for justice took her to the D.K. Foundation, a non-profit legal aid organization having an office on the premises of the jail. On Monday, Muzammil was finally released from the prison after having been acquitted in two cases and granted bail in the other two.
According to Muzammil, who is a welder and also a hafiz-i-Quran, he incurred the ire of some policemen living in his area with whom he had an altercation. The policemen, including Ali Dost and Hakeem, later returned in a police mobile van and picked him up with seven or eight other boys of the area.
“They kept us in illegal detention for three days, and demanded bribes for our release,” he said. “Some of the boys paid money and were set free, but I and three others could not pay them money and were charged with various crimes.” Muzammil remained in the police remand for 22 days, after which he was handed over to the Mauripur police in connection with two cases. Finally, he was remanded in jail.
Arif Dawood of the D.K. Foundation told Dawn that he was introduced to Muzammil by Reshman . “It took us two months to obtain bail in the two Mauripur police cases in the sum of Rs50,000 and Rs20,000. Then we called Muzammil’s father, Abdul Hameed, to furnish the surety bonds which he reluctantly did by depositing the papers of the Mochko house.” The mukhtiarkar of Mochko took another four months to verify the documents of the property for the court, Mr Dawood said.
Ironically, one of the two cases was being tried by two different courts at the same time. While one court granted bail to Muzammil, represented by Rukhsana Razi advocate, the other acquitted him. “Later, he was acquitted in both the cases registered by the Mauripur police, and the respective courts issued his release orders,” Dawood said.
But Muzammil was not released. “When we made inquiries, we came to know that Muzammil was implicated in two more cases registered by the Saeedabad police,” Dawood said. “Even Muzammil was not aware of those cases.”
Finally, the D.K. Foundation was able to obtain his bail in these two cases in the sum of Rs50,000 and Rs75,000. The surety bonds were furnished by two philanthropists — Nadeem Shafiqullah and Mohammad Tariq.
