Discovering a secret torture facility

Nearly two years have passed since Government Girls College in Zafarwal was converted into a local judicial lock up.

SIALKOT: Nearly two years have passed since the Government Girls College in Zafarwal was converted into a local judicial lock up. Recently, when the former schools administrative officials visited the premises to collect some furniture they had left behind, they witnessed the torture of prisoners at the facility.

“The place is deprived of any facilities and the prisoners were not being fed for days,” said a former school administrator Nadeem Cheema. He said that the lock up facility lacked basic services and that he had personally witnessed police officials tying up the prisoners like dogs and making them walk across rooms for their food on all fours.

Requesting anonymity, the administrator informed several government officials of the ‘torture cell’ and said that originally provincial education department concerned officials had established the college into several buildings for a judicial lock up in Zafarwal due to non-availability of any other suitable place. “When there were too few female students we eventually handed the building back to the police to use as a lock up facility,” said the former chowkidar of the college.

The administrators said that the government college in Zafarwal tehsil was the only girl’s institution in the area but it had been handed over for use as a lock up. “We thought that this building would serve a legal purpose not become a holding cell for torturing people,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 5^th, 2010.