Missing persons : Court wants better response from officials
Petitioner says personnel ‘encircled my house and left with my son’.
KARACHI:
A man has gone to court claiming that security personnel have taken into custody his son who has been missing since then.
Shafiq Ahmed filed a constitutional petition on Tuesday. He maintains that his son Muhammad Waqas was taken into custody by the law-enforcing agencies on April 29 at 3:30 pm. He said that men encircled his house and then left with his son in police mobile vans and other vehicles with private registration numbers. Since then, the detenue has not been produced before any court, and the family doesn’t know where he is.
As the petition came up for hearing, the authorities denied that Waqas was with them. The respondents include the director-general of Military Intelligence, the Rangers DG, the Sindh Inspector General of Police, the Deputy Inspector General for the Criminal Investigation Department, the DG for the Intelligence Bureau and Al Falah SHO.
In response, the bench of Chief Justice Mushir Alam and Justice Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi asked the officials to file a ‘proper enquiry report’ instead of only making a formal statement denying custody of a missing person.
The bench adjourned the proceedings for a week, ordering the official to make a serious effort to find the young man and to file a report of what they had done.
The same bench adjourned another petition for a week, filed by one Syed Sakhab Mian, who questioned the alleged illegal detention of his son Qari Haq Nawaz, who went missing on January 24, while travelling to his village in Allai district, Batgram tehsil. The missing person reportedly made a phone call and informed his mother that armed personnel, appearing to be military men, had taken him into custody.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 4th, 2011.
A man has gone to court claiming that security personnel have taken into custody his son who has been missing since then.
Shafiq Ahmed filed a constitutional petition on Tuesday. He maintains that his son Muhammad Waqas was taken into custody by the law-enforcing agencies on April 29 at 3:30 pm. He said that men encircled his house and then left with his son in police mobile vans and other vehicles with private registration numbers. Since then, the detenue has not been produced before any court, and the family doesn’t know where he is.
As the petition came up for hearing, the authorities denied that Waqas was with them. The respondents include the director-general of Military Intelligence, the Rangers DG, the Sindh Inspector General of Police, the Deputy Inspector General for the Criminal Investigation Department, the DG for the Intelligence Bureau and Al Falah SHO.
In response, the bench of Chief Justice Mushir Alam and Justice Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi asked the officials to file a ‘proper enquiry report’ instead of only making a formal statement denying custody of a missing person.
The bench adjourned the proceedings for a week, ordering the official to make a serious effort to find the young man and to file a report of what they had done.
The same bench adjourned another petition for a week, filed by one Syed Sakhab Mian, who questioned the alleged illegal detention of his son Qari Haq Nawaz, who went missing on January 24, while travelling to his village in Allai district, Batgram tehsil. The missing person reportedly made a phone call and informed his mother that armed personnel, appearing to be military men, had taken him into custody.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 4th, 2011.