KARACHI: The Sindh government has ordered an inquiry into reports that officials in jails or in police were involved in imprisoning wrong people in place of real offenders, it emerged on Tuesday.

The investigation will initially be confined to the matter of impersonation of two prisoners at the Karachi central prison. However, it would soon be widened to all jails in Sindh.

Officials in the provincial government told Dawn that Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah chaired a meeting at CM House to discuss the matter on Tuesday.

He formed a four-member inquiry committee comprising DIG Ghulam Sarwar Jamali, Additional Secretary (Home) Shafiq Shaikh and one representative each from Rangers and the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra).

They said the matter of prisoners impersonating for the real ones had shaken the government — though it was not unprecedented.

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A related inquiry was ordered a couple of years ago after reports suggested 41 impersonating cases in different jails of Sindh. There are conflicting reports about the fate of that inquiry.

Some officials claimed that the inquiry had been completed and a “few individuals” who were proved to be “wrongly or mistakenly” jailed or had “volunteered their services” in place of the real offenders had either been released or booked for forgery or impersonation.

However, other officials insisted that the inquiry was still under way and offered no relief to particularly those who had been wrongly detained by the authorities in place of the persons actually booked.

The fresh cases were reported from the Karachi central prison in which the two prisoners had accused the authorities of confining them wrongly for the crimes they had never committed.

In their applications addressed to the provincial home department, the two captives claimed that they had been confined in jail wrongly. They demanded their release and arrest of the “real culprits”.

The officials said that the inquiry committee had been asked to focus on all the aspects, particularly to look into the possibility whether they had been “mistakenly or intentionally” arrested by the police or police mistook their identity while producing them in court for their judicial remand or the wrongdoing had been committed after they had been sent to jail.

Sources said that the inquiry was “purely aimed at” fixing responsibility on the officials who were involved in jailing innocent persons for the crimes committed by others.

“But,” said an official, “before all this, the officials will first confirm the claim of the prisoners is true.”

For that, said the official, the representative of Nadra would help the committee by using the authority’s database to confirm whether the applicants’ claim about their innocence was correct.

Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2015

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