“Would they - the administration - ever realise the scars jail leaves on the minds of the innocent put in there for no reason?”

That was the telling comment of a senior officer of the Rawalpindi police on the misery of the family of a young man detained a week before Imran Khan and Dr Tahirul Qadri marched their PTI and PAT brigades into Islamabad to stay put until their demand for a change in the political system was met.

Khalid Habib’s ordeal was said to be representative of dozens of over 200 people arrested under 3MPO – a law designed to maintain public order - in an apparent drive to prevent people from joining the marches.

His brother Iqbal Habib said Khalid was coming from Mansehra to visit their ailing mother, staying with him, on August 8 but just vanished. With the mother’s worries rising all the time, family members started searching for him.

“We visited emergency wards of three government hospitals, Edhi centres and sought police help but to no avail. Our desperation was growing when on August 30 we got information that Khalid had been detained for 30 days, on the orders of Rawalpindi District Co-ordination Officer and was languishing in Adiala jail,” Iqbal, a low-grade employee in a private company, told Dawn.

Khalid had been in jail for 40 days and their efforts now focused on visiting him there. However, the jail authorities told them they needed permission from DCO Sajid Zafar for that.

“For two weeks I visited the DCO office with the request. My brother was no criminal and had no links with PTI (which rules Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa where Mansehra is situated),” Iqbal said.

“I also sought help of some journalists close to the DCO to seek Khalid’s release, as some detainees with connection had been released by him. But all my pleas went waste,” he said.

Eventually, Iqbal got a letter from the DCO to visit his brother in Adiala jail and was elated.

Iqbal did not know that distressful and shocking news awaited him and the distraught mother there. When they reached the jail on Thursday, the visiting day, the jail staff told them that because of overcrowding in Adiala prison, Khalid had been shifted with 100 other detainees held under 3MPO to the Attock district jail.

Majority of those arrested under that law were kept in ‘high security barracks’ meant for prisoners charged with terrorist activities.

When approached for comments, DCO Sajid Zafar said: “I cannot withdraw my orders for detention.” Further, the district administration had forwarded the cases of the 3MPO detainees to the Punjab Home Department in Lahore to decide whether to extend their period of detention by another 30 days or not. Iqbal was really crestfallen. “Sir, I beg you to release my brother. His mother is seriously ill and desperately waiting for him,” he implored the DCO who simply advised him to take his request to the home office in Lahore.

Like Iqbal, dozens of harassed people had been knocking at the doors of DCO, senior police officers and Adiala jail authorities for the whereabouts or release of their detained relatives.

Adiala jail houses 4,760 prisoners today, almost double its capacity. Two-hundred-fifty of them were held for resorting to violence during protest at the sit-ins site.

They are separate from the 203 people detained under 3-MPO before the political agitation started. One hundred and three of them have been shifted to district jail Jhelum and 100 to Attock jail.

Now their families have to travel to Attock or Jhelum to a few minutes meeting with their detained relatives. But before that they must visit the Home Department in Lahore to know what it has decided about their detainee.

Published in Dawn, September 20th , 2014