Missing person cases prolong despite court warnings

What could be the feelings of a widow whose only son first goes missing and then his body is dumped on a highway? The trauma from which Hamida Bibi has been passing is an answer to this query. Bitterly sobbing and crying the woman asked a Peshawar High Court bench: “I want to know what the crime of my son was and why was he arrested by the law-enforcement agencies?”
The bench headed by Chief Justice Dost Mohammad Khan had no reply to offer. An eerie silence descended on the courtroom filled to the capacity with relatives of missing persons on Jan 22. The woman continued to speak for many minutes and her narrations turned the atmosphere gloomy. She said that her son, Farmanullah, was the sole bread earner of her family and had left behind a young widow and a 10 month-old infant.
Hamida Bibi claimed that Farmanullah was a vegetable vendor as well as a watchman in Nauthia, Peshawar, and around 10 months ago he was arrested by law-enforcement agencies following which he went missing. “A few weeks ago I received information from the local police that the body of my son was dumped near the motorway in the jurisdiction of Parang police station of Charsadda and his identity card was lying nearby,” she said.

“Could someone return my son to me?” she asked and received no reply as her request was impossible to be fulfilled. The only thing the bench could do was to summon the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial police officer, the concerned senior superintendents of police and high-ups of motorway police for Feb 14, the next date of hearing.
The woman said that with no source of earning she had also to look after her two orphan nephews. One positive thing which the bench did was to ask the federal government why not pay Diyat (blood money) to the poor lady as her son was killed in custody.
The same day another woman named Gul Sanga also turned up in the hope to get justice and see her missing husband Shaukat Ali, who was picked up along with her brother-in-law Sardar Ali in Aug 2010 from Lunkhwar Road in Mardan. She claimed that the body of Sardar was handed over to them in Kohat by the law-enforcement agencies whereas Shaukat had still been missing.
Mehtab Bibi of Mohmand tribal region had come to seek help in tracing out her 12-year-old son, Naeem Khan, who was allegedly taken into custody by the security forces in Aug 2011. She alleged that the security forces raided their small hamlet and separated men and women of the area. She claimed that scores of men, including her seventh grade son Naeem Khan, were taken away.
Over 270 petitions were heard by the court that day. After repeated warnings, the court has now given last chance to the government to shift detainees to internment centres and provide lists to the court.
There are several dimensions to the phenomenon of “missing persons”. In most of the cases the detainees were picked up by officials of security forces, intelligence agencies or police and shifted to clandestine detention facilities.
Besides, several detainees were killed in custody and their bodies dumped in different areas. The police have so far failed in tracing the killers even in a single case.
Another category of detainees include those who have now been shifted to notified internment centres on the court orders. But still the problem existed as the Action (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulation 2011 for Fata and Pata – under which the internment centres are supposed to be run – has not been implemented properly.
Advocate Arif Jan, who has been appearing in missing persons’ case, said that the number of these cases was on the rise and now the government and law-enforcement agencies should adopt a clear position whether they would follow the laws or would continue to act in unconstitutional and illegal manner. He questioned the need for the Action (in Aid of Civil Power) Regulation when the detainees had still been kept in unauthorised detention facilities.