Kidnapped doctor shares the ups and downs of 35 days in captivity

SUKKUR:

“We died and lived every moment in those 35 days,” said Dr Azhar Ali Shah, an assistant professor at Ghulam Mohammad Mahar Medical College Sukkur. “Every day we would wake up with hope and end the day in disappointment because we didn’t know what our captors had thought about our fate.”

Shah and Dr Imtiaz Wagan, an anatomy professor at Dow University of Health Sciences were kidnapped from the vegetable market in Jacobabad. Shah used to run a private clinic in Jacobabad on weekends, while Wagan had gone to Sukkur to supervise anatomy examinations at Mahar college.

“On November 19, I planned to go to Jacobabad as usual,” said Shah. “Dr Wagan came with me because he wanted to meet up with some friends.”

He said that they planned to return to Sukkur the following morning because Wagan had to go to Mahar college to supervise the exams. He said that they left the guest house at around 6 am. “When we were near the vegetable market I saw a white Toyota parked by the roadside but I didn’t really think much about it,” Shah recalled. “Two men with veiled faces holding Kalashnikovs came in front of the car and stopped us.”

Shah said that they were ordered to get into the Toyota. The abductors took away their wallets and mobile phones as soon as they got into the car. “There were four of them. One man was driving while another one sat in the front and the other two were with us in the back seat,” he said. “They asked us to keep our heads down and drove like that for the next 45 minutes.”

Dr Shah added that the ride was bumpy so they must have driven on a katcha road.

When they got out of the car, the men handed the doctors over to two others and drove off. “The area was bare except for a few bushes,” said Shah. “We were kept there for two nights.”

Shah added that after they were taken to another place on motorcycles and had to walk for three hours. “After they made us walk the whole night, we reached a deserted place and were kept in a katcha room for 35 days,” he said. “We were handed over to three other people.”

While talking to The Express Tribune about how the kidnappers behaved with them, Shah said that they were fairly decent.  He said that he heard the men get angry. He added that they kept them well fed.

The doctors were not allowed to contact their families. But once or twice the men mentioned that they contacted their families for ransom. “For breakfast they usually gave us roti with butter and we would get beef curry and vegetables for other times,” said Dr Shah. “But, thank God, they never manhandled us, like they claimed to treat others.”

The police raided a katcha area of Garhi Yasin in Shikarpur and rescued the doctors after an alleged encounter with the kidnappers. No arrests were reported.

“After 35 days they told us that we were being released,” said Shah. “We did not believe them. Our captors just handed us over to them.”

The doctors were dropped off near the Sultankot police station, where a double cabin vehicle was waiting for them and took them to the office of the Jacobabad SSP where Shah’s father, uncle and cousins were waiting for him. “When we asked about the ransom, the SSP said that they didn’t pay a single penny for our release,” said Shah.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd,  2012.