LAHORE, Dec 11: Eight people who were held following a candlelit vigil at Justice M A Shahid Siddiqi’s GOR residence on December 6 were finally released on Tuesday evening, sparking off celebrations at the hunger-strike camp students had set up demanding end to their detention at the Lahore Press Club.

Meanwhile, Dawn has learnt through sources privy to the case that two women among the detainees — Erum Hassan and Saima Khwaja — were released on Saturday through “underhand deals” between lawyers and magistrates, but chose to “lay-low” while charges remained active and did not approach the media or even their own families.

The release of Javed Amin Khwaja, Ahmed Bashir, Akhtar Ahmed, Aman Ullah, Muhammed Ashfaq, Khazaz Muhammad, Omar Pervaiz, and Hassan Rehman from a residential sub-jail in R A Bazaar at 5.30pm on Tuesday, follows a presidential pardon to the professors and students of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) on Monday evening. A second pardon from authorities, which was dramatically conveyed to the presiding judge of an anti-terror court mid-way through proceedings, led to the eventual release of the GOR detainees.

Khurram Latif Khosa, an advocate representing the detainees, said he and the rest of the legal team had gone to plea for the detainees’ bail at 9am at the anti-terrorism court. A few hours into the case, presiding judge Shah Saheb announced an adjournment in order to discuss matters with the prosecution.

“I have received a message that all cases have been withdrawn,” Khosa quoted the judge as saying. The judge further declared that bail applications on all nine detainees were now ‘ineffective’.

After further negotiations with various officials around Lahore eventually secured their release papers from a magistrate’s court in Cantonment, the detainees were set free from a sub-jail that had been set up at the RA Bazaar residence of Amanullah, one of the detainees.