Top court orders K-P govt to produce seven missing persons on March 4.
PHOTO: FILE
Many of the missing persons released by the security forces have rejoined the militant groups they were affiliated with, while others have fled to Afghanistan, reveals the report of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government’s inquiry committee.
“According to intelligence agencies, Maulana Fazlullah and Maulvi Faqir, who are hiding in the neighbouring country along with a large number of [their] associates, are still carrying out raids against the security forces/civil administration in Dir and Chitral, in which many civilians and law-enforcement personnel have lost their lives,” says the report submitted before a two-judge Supreme Court bench on Tuesday.
The bench – headed by Justice Jawwad S Khawaja – was hearing the case of 35 missing persons. The court directed the K-P government to produce seven more missing persons before the bench on March 4. The men have to be produced before one judge in chamber.
According to the court’s order, the attorney general for Pakistan and relatives of the seven persons will also be present during the in-camera proceedings to identify them.
The court has also summoned the superintendent in-charge of the Malakand Interment Centre, Attaullah Khan, to identify these persons. He has already submitted that he himself had handed 35 ‘missing’ persons over to the army on December 4, 2012.
The bench, meanwhile, rejected the K-P inquiry committee’s recommendation to transfer all missing persons’ cases to the commission on enforced disappearances.
According to the report, seven persons are alive and were already produced before the court on December 7 last year. But the K-P government shall produce, if the SC directs them to, the seven missing persons – five of whom have been freed and the two remaining are detained in the internment centre.
The report also claimed that more than 400 Pakistani nationals are confined in Afghan prisons and a large number of militants and their associates are living in IDPs camps in Afghanistan.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 26th, 2014.
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