ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court ordered the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on Tuesday to produce before the court on March 4 seven of 35 missing persons in the same manner in which an equal number of missing persons had been produced before the court on Dec 7, 2013.

The seven persons are among the 35 who had disappeared in Sept 2011 when the army authorities are believed to have shifted them from an internment centre in Malakand.

The 35 persons are among 66 undeclared interned persons, including Yasin Shah, on whose disappearance a petition has been filed in the court. A two-member bench headed by Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja is hearing the case.

Of them, 31 were later declared interned persons and the remaining 35 are believed to have been shifted to an undisclosed place. Two of them died of natural causes in the internment centre, one went to Saudi Arabia and 11 were in Afghanistan, the court was told in an earlier hearing.

A group of seven persons, of whom five are free and two are in the internment centre, will be produced before the court during an in-camera hearing and the court’s registrar has been ordered to make arrangements.

The court directed KP Advocate General Abdul Latif Yousufzai to make security arrangements for the production of the missing persons before the court with the help of the federal government.

To ascertain the identity of the seven, presence of their relatives in the court will be ensured and they will be questioned by a judge in a similar way as was done when the other seven people had been produced along with their relatives last year.

The order for the production of the missing persons came when the AG submitted a five-page inquiry report of a committee which said over 400 Pakistani nationals were feared to be in prisons in Afghanistan. Besides, a large number of militants and their associates are living in camps of internally displaced people in Kunar province of the neighbouring country.

Efforts had been made to seek documents about the people in Afghanistan to determine whether the 35 missing were among them, the report said.

It said that many associates of militants released from the internment centre had reportedly rejoined militant groups and fled to Afghanistan.

According to intelligence reports, Maulana Fazalullah and Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, hiding in Afghanistan with a large number of associates, were carrying out raids against security forces/civil administration in Dir and Chitral in which many civilians and personnel of law-enforcement agencies had been killed.

During an inquiry, the report said, it had been noticed that intelligence agencies, police, Levies and political administration had been overstretched while dealing with militancy.

The KP government requested the court to refer the missing persons’ cases, including that of Yasin Shah, to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances so that efforts for their recovery might be concentrated at one forum.

Petitions filed for repatriation of prisoners

Also on Tuesday, Amina Masood Janjua, the chairperson of the Defence of Human Rights, filed two petitions in the apex court. One of them seeks repatriation to their countries of 52 foreign prisoners languishing in Adyala Jail despite having completed their jail terms ranging from two to six years.

The prisoners are from Iran, India, Tanzania, Kuwait, Dominican Republic, Nigeria and other countries. Twenty-seven of them belong to countries which do not have embassies in Islamabad.

The petitioner requested the court to also issue a directive for an inquiry into the causes of delay in sending the prisoners to their native countries.

In the second petition, she seeks diplomatic efforts for repatriation of 290 Pakistani nationals languishing in Chinese prisons.