KARACHI, Oct 29: Scores of women, along with their children, staged a demonstration outside the Karachi Press Club on Sunday to demand the release of their relatives languishing in Sri Lankan jails for years.

They were holding placards and banners inscribed with the demand for the release of 42 Pakistani prisoners from Sri Lankan prisons.

Rabia Khatoon, an elderly woman and mother of one of these Pakistanis, told media men that there were 40 men and two women who had gone to Sri Lanka through some agents for jobs.

She held the agents responsible for their plight saying that the innocent people had been trapped in their web.

One of the two imprisoned women hails from Karachi and the other from Lahore, whereas the men hailed from Karachi, Lahore, Sukkur, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Rahimyarkhan, Gujarat and Sahiwal.

“Some of them are in the Lankan jails for as long as 15 years,” Rabia Khatoon said.

The demonstrators urged President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to use their good offices and influence in the release and repatriation of the Pakistanis.