Illegal confinement: Magistrate seals house where varsity student was recovered from

Father claims police arrested man from Gizri house on May 31.

KARACHI: Following the directions of a district and sessions court, the officials sealed an abandoned house from where a university student was recovered during a raid on June 2.

Altaf Arif had gone to court and moved a habeas corpus application under section 491 of the Criminal Procedure Code saying that his son, Hassan Arif, was picked up by the police from his house in Gizri on May 31. Altaf had told the court that his son had been kept at the Crime Investigation Agency centre. He said that the detainee was picked up within the jurisdiction of Gizri police station and found within the jurisdiction of Boat Basin police station.

A judicial magistrate, an assistant commissioner magistrate and a head bailiff, Mudassir Hussain, had raided an old police check post that was later declared a house of a policeman in Clifton and recovered a man, Hassan, apparently kept there in wrongful confinement.

Several armed men present at the site in Clifton Block 1 had managed to escape by climbing a boundary wall and also took away four other detainees with them, Hussain said. He also disclosed that Arif was recovered only when he fell down and the armed men left him behind while fleeing. No FIR or report in the daily policy diary recorded the arrest of the student, he added.

Following recovery, Hassan deposed that he had been picked up from his house in Gizri, blindfolded, maltreated and kept at another place along with some other detainees for a day and then shifted to the house.

After the bailiff's report, comments by the police and statements of the detainee and his father were recorded, the district and sessions judge South, Ahmed Saba, asked the Clifton SP to hold an inquiry into the incident and file a report. The SP told the court that the place of incident belonged to a police constable, Nasrullah, who has gone to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa after he was shot and injured in an encounter. He had denied that the place of incident was a police check post in the past.

On Thursday, the house was sealed under the supervision of the judicial magistrate, Ghulam Raza, and on the indication of the bailiff as he had raided the place on court order. The Gizri SHO was ordered to provide protection to the officials. The officials are expected to file a report on Friday.