PESHAWAR, Dec 27: A man allegedly picked up by an intelligence agency’s personnel more than nine months ago has been released, it is learnt. The detainee, Hayat Khan, was left on the outskirts of the provincial capital by unidentified personnel of the agency last week.

“Hayat Khan was dropped near Badabher and he has been directed to keep silent about his illegal incarceration for nine months,’’ a relative of the detainee told Dawn.

During his detention, Hayat was kept incommunicado and never presented in any court.

Mr Hayat Khan, who is about 30 years old and considered an activist of the proscribed Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan by the security agencies, was picked up from the Islamabad International Airport on May 12 when he was going to Dubai for a job. Family sources said the captors had asked him about the suicide bombing in Hangu district of Feb 11 in which 37 people had been killed.

“He was also questioned about the killing of a scholar in Gilgit,” the sources said.

The detainee, a resident of Serki Gate area, believed that he had been kept at a ‘safe house’ in Rawalpindi. “During the last few months they almost forgot that I was there,” he told his family, according to the sources.

His father Noor Mohammad, who is about 75 and bed-ridden, told journalists that Mr Khan was the sole breadwinner of the family and they had faced financial crisis.

The five children of the detainee had been told by their mother that their father had gone to Karachi.