PESHAWAR, May 1: A juvenile offender, Qismat Khan, is serving 45 years of rigorous imprisonment under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) at central prison, Haripur.

Qismat Khan has requested the president, Chief Justice of Pakistan, NWFP governor and human rights organizations to look into his case, as he and his other innocent family members were convicted by the assistant political agent at behest of some influential land-grabbers.

The offender has been in detention for the last nine years since his arrest on April 20, 1995, by the tribal administration of Khyber Agency.

The APA concerned had convicted him, exercising his powers under the FCR, and ordered that all his sentences would run consecutively instead of concurrently.

Qismat Khan, who was a student in Karachi and was on leave from school, his brother Milat Khan and his cousin Ali Mohammad were charged under about a dozen sections of the Pakistan Penal Code read with section 11 of the FCR.

The sections deal with stopping a public servant from performing his duty, rioting, creating disturbance in public, threat to human life.

The APA sentenced them to different prison terms and ordered that the terms would run consecutively and not concurrently.

Normally, in settled areas the trial courts order that prison terms on different counts should run concurrently and not consecutively, but in tribal areas the administration acts otherwise.

A fact-finding team of Juvenile Justice Network (JJN), during its recent visit to the Haripur prison, met Qismat Khan, 24. The team found out that at the time of his arrest he was only 15.

It is learnt that his appeal to the high court was also dismissed on the ground that under the Constitution, the superior courts could not exercise any jurisdiction in tribal areas.

Under Section 35 of the Criminal Procedure Code, a sentence in case of conviction in several offences at one trial should not be longer than a period of 25 years. However, the tribal administration normally do not follow this provision.

Qismat Khan told the team members that they had purchased 11 kanals of land from Said Mohammad and Muhajir Gul in 1988 in Shahkas area of Jamrud (Khyber Agency), and made houses on that piece of land. He claimed that two men, Saleem and Tawas, fraudulently sold 135 acres of land, including their land at Shahkas, to the Peshawar Development Authority (PDA) in connivance with the administration for inclusion in the Phase VII of the Hayatabad Township.

He further said that they started sending letters to Anti- Corruption Establishment and the FIA for inquiring into the misdeeds of officers of the PDA and the two agents, which annoyed the tribal administration.

He added that on April 20, 1995, Mehsud Scouts attacked their houses under supervision of APA Fazal Rabi, and bulldozed their houses, leaving women and children without any shelter.

The raiding force arrested all male members present there, including Qismat Khan, and charged them with obstructing demolition of the houses, he added.

The coordinator of the JJN, Arshad Mahmood, told Dawn that they had been campaigning for the extension of Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, 2000, to Fata and Pata.

He said: "It is now an established fact that the FCR is a black law, which should be abolished, but successive governments have not been touching it due to their own vested interests."

Mr Mahmood said that the story of Qismat Khan, who has spent precious years of his life behind bars, was a challenge and an eye-opener for the society specially the superior judiciary, human rights groups and policy-makers.