LAHORE: Police allegedly picked two employees of a law chamber on Saturday and detained them “unlawfully” for over three hours for providing food to the visually-impaired persons protesting on The Mall for their rights.

Law chamber’s head, Mr Mansoor Hasan Khan Advocate, a senior corporate lawyer, criticised police for detaining his employees illegally for distributing food among the hungry visually-impaired protesters.

Chamber’s employees Shah Mehmood (driver) and Mansoor Ammar (personal assistant to Mr Khan) had been distributing food and water among the protesters for the last few days on the direction of their boss on humanitarian grounds.

“We have been providing meals and water to the visually-impaired persons who have been holding a peaceful protest on The Mall. Yesterday (Friday) when my office assistant Mansoor

Ammar and driver Shah Muhammad went to deliver them meals and water, they were questioned by the police,” reads a complaint sent to the Lahore High Court chief justice by the lawyer.

“This afternoon (Nov 9) at around 4:15pm, the aforementioned staff again went to the protest site to provide food and water to the blind persons. They left the site at 4:30pm. But later they disappeared and their phones were found switched off. So I request the LHC to exercise its powers to ensure release of the employees,”

The lawyer said the police investigated his staff and later released them after getting an affidavit about “safe driving” from them. “Since the police were at fault and had no justification, they got an affidavit from our staff that they would be careful while driving the car in future,” he wondered.

“They (the police) did this just to make a justification for detention of my staff,” he said. The police also warned them against distributing food among the protesters in future.

SSP (Operation) Muhammad Naveed said the police just picked the employees for a brief investigation.

“We didn’t do anything bad with them. We just briefly interrogated them and released them, allowing them to provide food to the protesters,” he claimed.

Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2019