PESHAWAR, Sept 6: Three ‘missing people’ have returned home after being allegedly kept in illegal detention by an intelligence agency for more than nine months.
Fazalullah and his two uncles Shareefullah and Samiullah, picked from a refugee registration centre in Kohat on Nov 22 last year, had allegedly been kept at a ‘safe house’ of the agency.
The Supreme Court had on Tuesday directed the government to release all missing people.
The detainees returned home on Wednesday night, said Attaullah, father of detainee Fazalullah. He told Dawn that the intelligence agency had handed them over to the political administration of a tribal agency which deported them to Afghanistan. They were not involved in any crime and had valid documents, so they returned back to Pakistan and came home, he added.
“There is great festivity at our home and the family is celebrating their return,” he said, adding that neighbours and relatives had been visiting their home and congratulating them.
“Our family had been passing through trauma for nine months and my mother lost her eyesight due to constant crying,” he said. He said they faced hard times over that period because the three were the family’s main bread earners.
Names of the three detainees were mentioned in a petition filed in the Supreme Court by Human Rights Commission of Pakistan chairperson Asma Jehangir.
The issue of their disappearance took an interesting turn in May when the family was allegedly cheated by the intelligence agency. The agency had told the family that the detainees would be freed after they withdrew their petition and announced their return. The family had done so. But after appearance of the news of their release in the media, the agency was reportedly reluctant to free them and the family again approached the HRCP.
The three people, living in the Gamkol Shareef refugee camp in Kohat, had gone to a registration office along with their family members.
Eyewitnesses had told Attaullah that officials, some of them in plain clothes, were forcing Shareefullah into a vehicle when the other two approached them. When the raiding team came to know that they were his relatives they were also pushed into the vehicle and taken away.
The detainees had neither been produced in the court nor had their relatives been allowed to meet them.
A few days ago, a former detainee of the Guantanamo Bay camp, Abdur Raheem Muslim Dost, had told journalists that he, too, had been kept with the three people at the ‘safe house’.
After release from the Guantanamo detention camp, Muslim Dost was re-arrested last year allegedly by an intelligence agency. Later, the Afghan scholar was handed over to the tribal administration which detained him under section 40 of the Frontier Crimes Regulation and section 14 of the Foreigners Act. He is now imprisoned in the Peshawar Central Prison.
