THIS is apropos the article ‘A princely promise’ (Feb 17). The writer mentions that close to 11,000 Pakistani prisoners are languishing in foreign jails of them a whopping 6,000 are jailed in the Middle East.

She goes on to observe that a record number of Pakistanis (more than 30) were executed in Saudi Arabia in 2019. Here is the harrowing part. The list of executed prisoners included a couple who were presumably arrested and sentenced to death on drug trafficking charges. The couple had arrived in Jeddah in 2016 along with their daughter, then aged five. The child was detained in two different locations in the kingdom, first with her mother and later at a children’s designated facility before a relative managed to reach the kingdom and returned with her to Pakistan, six months prior to her parents’ execution.

Can one beg to ask where the government, the human rights ministry, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and other well-founded, tall-standing human rights organisations were when this tragic incident was being played out?

Shouldn’t they have sent a mercy petition to the Saudi government to save the mother’s life for the sake of Allah, to allow her to be repatriated to Pakistan, either to live as a free person or to serve out her commuted jail sentence here in the presence of her daughter?

This child, now eight years old, will have to wrestle against the trauma, perhaps, for the rest of her life. The Holy Quran tells us saving one life is like saving the entire humanity.

May we be rightly guided in complex, legal, life and death issues!

Abbas R. Siddiqi
Lahore

Published in Dawn, March 3rd, 2020