August 27, 2007	Monday	Sha’aban 13, 1428

ALLEGATIONS that police use criminal methods in fighting crime are widespread in the society — and for good reason.

It is not for nothing that our simple folks, generation after generation, have said the prayer: “O’ Allah, keep me clear of police, courts and hospitals”.

Honest officers would admit that police highhandedness is common in investigating crimes but argue that majority of the crimes would not be solved if police went strictly by the rules. Extra-legal methods have to be adopted sometimes to crack open hardened criminals and bust the crime.

That the arbitrary process punishes mostly the innocent is dismissed as “unfortunate”.

Their misfortune starts the moment they are “picked up” by police as a suspect, and worsens as they are tortured to confess their supposed crime.

The Police Rules of 1934 are meant to ensure an arrested person treatment in accordance with law. It requires police to record every detention in the police station’s Roznamcha and to produce the detainee in a court of law within 24 hours. Since that is “too short a time” to establish his guilt, the police, in many cases, do not record his arrest and hold him in illegal custody until he cracks up, guilty or not.

If he had been “whisked away”, instead of being “picked up”, his family too would be suffering during his interrogation as he would be “a missing person” for it. Even his belated entry in the Roznamcha is made in pencil so that police could change it to support its “findings”.

Such practices are a mockery of law and sometimes lead to serious human rights violations. But police resort to them to produce “results”. It is difficult to bust crimes with the limited resources and time available to police, goes the argument.

For instance, law allows physical remand for maximum of 14 days after which the court is obliged to send the accused to jail in judicial remand. That emboldens hardened criminals to stand firm during the 14 days in police custody and deny his crime when he goes into the relative comfort of jail.

Sometime the police capture a wanted criminal from a place outside its jurisdiction and show he had been arrested within its precinct to legal and turf tussles.

Police rules require the pursuer to inform the area police in such situations but sometimes the latter alerts the prey that there are plans to arrest him and he escapes.

Some recent actions by Islamabad police go to prove that the rules were not observed.

On August 22 it claimed to have arrested five persons who were directly involved in the suicide attacks that rocked the capital city last month. It said Imdad Hussain and Nasir Mehmood were arrested near Rawal Dam Chowk with two pistols and hand grenades on August 20.

But Nasir Mehmood was actually arrested, along with Waqar, with explosives and a suicide jacket, by security agencies near Murree on August 12, and Imdad Hussian from Saddar, Rawalpindi.

The alleged masterminds of the suicide attacks - Fasihulla alias Tipu, Faisal Mushtaq and Qasim Mushtaq - were arrested by security forces from Barakhu.

After interrogating them, the security agencies handed over the accused to Islamabad police to pursue the legal process.

In the case of the two alleged killers of Maulana Azam Tariq, the city police claimed to have arrested them on February 20 when their families insisted they had been “forcibly disappeared” weeks earlier.

They said they had reported Mohammad Ali Asif, a resident of district Jhelum, and Mudassir Ali of district Bhakkar, missing to police in Pind Dadan Khan and Rawalpindi on January 9 and 10.

Charges of terrorism were slapped on them only after the Defence of Human Rights (DHR) organization started probing the police about their disappearance.

The DHR was informed of the disappearance of the two men on February 18 and on February 20 the police announced that it had captured two terrorists who had assassinated MNA Maulana Azam Tariq and his four gunmen in October 2003, 45 mourners on his first death anniversary, and MPA Binyameen and his two gunmen in July 2006.

The police claimed that the two were arrested in a raid on a house in Sector G-6/2 on February 20.

Ghazala Bibi, wife of Mudassir Ali, who was in the business of installing security cameras in buildings, said police piqued by her participation in a protest against forced disappearances in front of the parliament, implicated her husband in terrorism cases.

Khwaja Javed Iqbal said his brother Mohammad Ali Asif was kidnapped by eight unidentified persons on January 9.