PESHAWAR, April 17: Hundreds of Pakistanis arrested on minor charges have been languishing in different jails of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia waiting for their trials to begin, relatives of the imprisoned people told Dawn on Wednesday.

“My younger brother was arrested for lack of proper documents required for entering the Kingdom two years back, but the authorities are yet to frame charges against him,” said Amjad Ali of Bannu.

According to him, a few months ago his brother had sent a letter through his friend, asking his relatives back home to contact the Saudi embassy or the Pakistani embassy in Saudi Arabia to take up his case. He said they were unable to approach the authorities either in Islamabad or Riyadh.

Similarly, hundreds of other Pakistanis, who had been arrested for lack of visa documents, possessing knives or for careless driving are facing difficulty to pursue their cases.

“My son went to Saudi Arabia three years ago. He was working as a tailor in Makkah where he had a brawl with a local which landed him in hot waters. He is in Makkah jail for the last two years while his mother, a heart patient, has suffered immensely during this period,” said Abdul Jabbar of Rawalpindi. He said he visited Saudi embassy and Ministry of Interior in Islamabad and tried his level-best to approach someone and seek help but to no avail.

He claimed that a number of people were not released despite the fact that the government of Saudi Arabia had announced a general amnesty for both the native and overseas prisoners in the month of Ramazan in connection with completion of two-decade rule of King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz. A large number of prisoners had been released under the same amnesty scheme while the cases of Pakistanis were still pending before the courts, he added.

“The main problem they are facing is that they had no relatives or friends in the Kingdom to approach the authorities concerned and in this way their cases lingered on,” he added.

Another problem haunting the relatives of these people is that the jailed or detained people were finding it hard to get the trial of their cases started at the courts.

Another Peshawar-based man was arrested by the authorities in the Kingdom on the suspicion of involvement in Hundi business. “The authorities nabbed him because he had a lot of money which prompted the authorities to suspect him as Hundi operator despite the fact that he had been running a well-established business there for the last 20 years. Now despite the passage of two years his trial is yet to begin,” said Raees Ahmad.

There are also reports that many Pakistanis below the age of 18 got trapped by narcotic smugglers and on landing in Saudi Arabia, were arrested by the authorities along with contraband, sent to jail and executed after summary trial.

Every year, hundreds of Pakistani nationals are executed in Saudi Arabia in connection with drug-related cases.

“The Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Nepali governments were pursuing the cases of their citizens through their embassies. But the Pakistani government never took any interest in the cases of its citizens,” said a driver.