PESHAWAR, Jan 29: The Peshawar High Court on Wednesday directed the deputy attorney-general to inform it on the next hearing about the whereabouts of five Arab employees of a Kuwaiti NGO arrested nine months back by the intelligence agencies.

A two-member bench comprising Justice Tallat Qayyum Qureshi and Justice Qazi Ahsanullah Qureshi also sought comments from the director-general of the Inter-Service Intelligence on four identical writ petitions challenging the detention of the employees of the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society.

The court fixed Feb 6 for next hearing.

Appearing for detainees, Advocate Ikram Chaudhry argued that the government had been using delaying tactics and was not informing the court as to which agency had detained the Arabs.

He said the petitions had been pending before the court for the last nine months but the respondents had not filed their comments.

The lawyer argued that the inspector-general of police, NWFP, and the ministry of interior had expressed their ignorance about the detention of the five Arabs.

The Revival of Islamic Heritage Society is one of the seven organizations put on terrorist lists by the US State Department about four months ago.

The petitioners are relatives of the detainees, Hamad Ali, Muhammad Al Ghazali, Hassan Khalil, Al-Rasheed and Jalib Muhammad.

Akram Chaudhry said the five were picked up from their residences by joint teams of the ISI, Pakistan army and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had been in illegal detention since May 27.

The respondents in these petitions are the federation of Pakistan through General Pervez Musharraf, the ministry of defence through defence secretary, the ministry of interior through federal secretary, the IGP of the NWFP, and the ISI director-general.

The deputy-attorney general for Pakistan, Hamid Farooq Durrani, informed the court that he was not aware of the arrests as these cases were previously tackled by another DAG, Salahuddin. Mr Durrani said he was appearing in these cases for the first time.

The bench directed the deputy attorney-general to inquire from all the respondents about the detainees and positively inform the court whether the detainees were in the custody of any of the respondents.

The petitioners have requested the court to declare the arrest and detention of their relatives unauthorized, without jurisdiction and illegal.

They also prayed the court to order production of the detainees before the court and to set them at liberty.