KASUR: After spending more than half of his life behind the bars for a crime he never committed, 45-year-old Mazhar Farooq blames police corruption, a cumbersome legal process and cruelty of jail authorities for his suffering.

Farooq was a second-year student at the FC College in 1992, when during a visit to his home at Kaisar Garh village, some 10km from here, life took an ugly turn for him and his family. He, along with his brothers and an uncle, was implicated in a false murder case by their rivals.

Narrating his ordeal to Dawn, he said he was awarded death sentence by a local trial court in 1998 that was upheld by the Lahore High Court (LHC) in 2008. It took him eight more years to secure from the Supreme Court the leave to appeal. He was finally declared innocent by the court for lack of evidence and on some other ground in 2016, after remaining behind the bars for 24 long years.

During these years, he said his family spent whatever money they had, and even had to sell some of their land to meet the heavy expenses incurred on a murder trial in a system that is overtly biased against the poor. Their remaining land was grabbed by some locally influential people.

“I was a young man when I was put behind the bars, and came out a feebleman who looked twice his age,” said Farooq, whose hand were continuously shaking while he was talking.

“Everything has changed during the period I spent in jail,” he laments.

He said his younger brother developed mental health issues soon after the LHC upheld his death sentence.

After corrupt police and an inefficient judicial system failed him, prison authorities too added to his miseries.

“From mobile phones to narcotics and what not; every thing was available inside the jail if you can afford to bribe jail officials. Otherwise, life is hell once you enter a prison,” Farooq said.

He lamented that no facility, including good food etc, the government allowed from time to time, reached down to prisoners because of corruption of jail staff and officers.

However, against all odds he had to face during his imprisonment in various jails, including Kasur, Lahore, Multan and Sheikhupura, he completed his graduation, did various courses and even his masters degree in political science.

“Now I have nothing but the degrees I got during my jail term,” he said.

He said as he had to spend his most productive years in prison, state should provide him some job or financial help so that he could spend rest of his life with dignity.

He said the whole system needed a drastic change so that others could be saved from what he had to go through.

Published in Dawn December 8th, 2016