MANSEHRA, June 17: Relatives of the alleged Nishtar Park suicide bomber have disputed the government’s claim, and said that he was not a religious man and he had gone to Karachi 20 days before the blast.

They told Dawn here that the photograph of Mohammad Siddiq released by the Sindh government on Friday had been taken from his national identity card snatched from his brother, who had gone to Karachi to search for his missing brother.

They said Siddiq, 19, was a secular person. “He had gone to Karachi to look for a job and he had nothing to do with the carnage,” one of his brothers, Mohammad Shafique, said.

Siddiq’s father Mohammad Israel and mother Zaver Jan are reported to have been taken to Karachi. They were picked up allegedly by personnel of an intelligence agency from Sari-Kamashi, a remote mountainous village some 50km north of Mansehra, on Saturday.

Rafique, who went to Karachi to find his missing brother, was taken into custody by an intelligence agency earlier this month.

The youngest of three brothers and two sisters, Siddiq went to Karachi on March 20, 2006, to the home of his uncle Sheer Zaman on Manghopir Road.

His relatives claimed that he had talked to them twice on phone after arriving in Karachi to inform them about his job and safety, but he went missing later.

His brother Shafique said on Sunday that seven personnel, two of them in police uniform, had taken away his parents and flown them to Karachi. “My brother is innocent and he cannot commit such a heinous crime, as he did not have any link with any political or religious party. He went to Karachi to earn money for his marriage,” he said.

He alleged that the authorities had hatched a conspiracy to implicate Siddiq in the attack when his brother Rafique approached the Sindh government to get its help to find the missing man.

He said Siddiq used to sell Biryani in Karachi before he went missing and according to his uncle he never had any link with the banned Lasker-i-Jhangvi or any other jihadi group as claimed by the government.

Siddiq’s sister Safia Bibi said: “My brother was a simple and very kind man who had never even killed an insect, how could he blow himself up to kill his Muslim brothers.”

She said the government had implicated here brother in the case and taken away her parents and another brother, and now the rest of her family’s members were being threatened by intelligence agencies’ officials.