Family rows: Bangladeshi woman finds shelter at Edhi home

She came to demand her husband’s help for their children, spent 6 months in Amritsar jail before reaching Sialkot.

SIALKOT:

A Bangldeshi woman, Razia Bibi, 45, who arrived in Pakistan more than three months ago by crossing the border near Sialkot is staying at an Edhi Shelter Home at Allama Iqbal Chowk. Bibi was brought to the shelter home by relatives of her former husband, Bashir Ahmed, resident of Matral village in Head Marala police area.

Earlier, she had stayed at Ahmed’s house for at least three months. Talking to The Express Tribune, she said she had come to Pakistan to demand maintenance for her children. She said that during her stay at her husband’s village, her brother-in-law, Munir Ahmed and step children, Abdul Rasheed, Mushtaq and Razzaq, beat her up. She said she was kept in chains so that she could not discuss the issue with anyone in the neighbourhood.

Head Marala station house officer Rana Azam told the Tribune that Ahmed had submitted an application two days ago stating that Bibi had left their home in Matral village 23 years ago with her two children. In the application, Azam said, they claimed that the women had been staying at their house in Matral for three months. They said she was moved to Edhi shelter home so that she could be deported to Bangladesh. They said Bashir had already divorced her and claimed that she or her children were not entitled to any maintenance or a share in his property.

The woman said her husband’s family had tricked her into signing the divorce papers. On July 4, she said, her brother-in-law and nephews had insisted the shelter home with a lawyer and got her thumb impressions on several blank papers. The next day, she said, they had sent the papers back with a divorce statement endorsed by her husband.

She said she had earlier spent six months in a jail in Amritsar after she was caught trying to cross the border into Pakistan.

Razia said she and Bashir Ahmed got married in 1983 without his parent’s. She said her husband later convinced her parents and the couple relocated to Karachi along with her parents-in-law.

She said that her in-laws remained cold towards her and her two children, until she left Pakistan and went back to Bangladesh six years later. She said her in-laws later moved back to Sialkot and Ahmad remarried.

She said that her children were grown up now and living a ‘miserable’ life in Bangladesh. “Their condition forced me to come and seek their father,” she said.

She said she was handed over by Indian authorities to the Pakistani officials on the instructions of the Indian judge who had heard her case and sentenced her to six months in prison. However, she could not produce a passport or travel documents.

A Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) official said the agency dealt with border countries other than India and Afghanistan. He said no case of a Bangladeshi woman crossing Indian border into Pakistan was reported to the FIA during the last year.



Published in The Express Tribune, July 8^th, 2011.