KARACHI: The Sindh High Court was informed on Wednesday that a meeting of the provincial task force for missing persons would be convened within two weeks for making practical guidelines for investigating officers (IOs) to recover missing persons.

The Sindh home secretary submitted that little progress in the cases of missing persons was made due to lack of capacity of police and the task force would provide the IOs proper guiding principles.

A two-judge SHC bench headed by Justice Mohammad Karim Khan Agha asked the home secretary that such recommendations should not be passed in stereotype sessions, but must be practical, meaningful, manageable and understandable for the IOs.

The bench also directed the joint investigation team (JIT) for missing persons to trace out the death certificate of a missing man, Abdul Jabbar, who is said to have died because of hepatitis in a Nawabshah hospital, or to collect evidence to establish his death.

The court asks the home secretary that guidelines must be practical and understandable for investigating officers

Earlier, the bench had expressed resentment over the task force for not producing any meaningful result and asked the chief minister to make it an effective body and also directed the home secretary, provincial law officer and the additional inspector general of police to sit together and go through the previous orders of the court about missing persons.

The bench was hearing a petition seeking the recovery of a missing person allegedly picked up by police in 2016 in Nawabshah.

In a previous hearing, the home secretary submitted that the missing person in question had died due to hepatitis in a hospital in Nawabshah.

The bench had observed that its April 10 order had also not been complied with by the home secretary, adding that the purpose of the order was to find out whether the recommendations of the task force, which were given in a stereotype manner, would actually be of any value in tracing out any of the missing persons.

It added that apparently, the recommendations being made by the task force were of little, if any, practical assistance and simply an eyewash, which was of great disappointment for the families of missing persons since they put their trust on the task force as a higher forum to trace out their loved ones.

Mir Dost had petitioned the SHC in 2016 stating that police picked up his son Jabbar and brother Saeed Khan in Oct 2016 from their home in Nawabshah.

He submitted that police did not produce his son before any court and demanded money against his release, adding that since then the whereabouts of his son remained unknown.

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2019