June 24, 2007	Sunday	Jamadi-us-Sani 08, 1428

MANSEHRA, June 23: Two brothers of the alleged Nishtar Park suicide bomber have appealed to the president and the prime minister to set their elderly parents free.

“Our parents do not know anything about the Nishtar Park carnage. Mohammad Siddiq’s (the alleged bomber) friends had sent him to Karachi to get a job there and earn money, enabling him to marry soon,” said one of them.

The appeal was published in a local newspaper, Mahasib, on Saturday, in which Mohammad Shafi and Mohammad Shafiq pleaded that their parents were innocent and had no connection with the Nishtar Park attack. The president and the prime minister should intervene in the matter, they said.

They added that their brother, Mohammad Siddiq, was innocent and Sindh’s home department had falsely implicated him in the case.

The two men told this correspondent that they were being threatened on phone, and said that an anonymous caller was asking them to issue a statement that their parents had not been arrested from the Sare-Kamashi area. “Personnel of a secret agency had taken our parents in custody from Sare-Kamashi and shifted them to Karachi.”