April 3, 2024
By Ahmed Saeed
Supreme Court lawyer Shabbir Hussain Gigyani has disclosed that at least six inmates of Peshawar Central Jail have disappeared from within the jail premises following the grant of bail by the Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC). Among those who are reported missing from the jail are Hikmat Khan, Muhammad Usman, Noor Agha, Yaseen, and Kaleem.
Gigyani has moved the Peshawar High Court (PHC) for the release of inmates.
Gigyani said the six men went missing between March 28 and April 1, 2024, and that all of them had been victims of enforced disappearances – “They were named in untraced cases only after the courts asked the authorities to produce them.”
He added that upon receiving court orders, state agencies named these individuals in untraced cases, such as target killings and blind murders, when unknown terrorists were already charged in these cases. “They then filed a report in the high court stating that these persons were wanted in the cases,” he said.
He added that he pursued the cases of these men in the ATC and secured their bails in the last week of March 2024.
Gigyani accused the jail authorities and Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) officials of maintaining a liaison, alleging that the prison officials informed the CTD officials about the release orders of the inmates. “The jail authorities not only obtained the thumbprints of the inmates who were going to be released on a register, but also requested the relatives of these inmates to provide their thumbprints on the register and recorded their video confirming that they had received their loved ones in the jail,” he said.
However, according to the affidavit filed by the relatives of the missing persons in court, he informed, “the jail authorities did not hand over the released inmates to them; instead, they were handed over to the CTD officials who took them away,” he said.
Based on his information, the CTD officials have permanently deputed a team and made a makeshift office in containers inside the jail premises, and the team calls the released inmates inside the container for the purposes of gathering their data.
Voicepk contacted the Superintendent of Central Jail Peshawar, Waseem Khan, to obtain his perspective on the accusations leveled by advocate Gigyani. Khan outrightly rejected the claims.
He claimed that no inmate has gone missing from inside the jail premises, and refuted allegations of the presence of CTD officials or their makeshift office inside the jail premises. “Only a few personnel of Peshawar police under the supervision of a DSP are deployed inside the jail for security purposes, and those police personnel have nothing to do with the entrance or exit of inmates,” he said.
The jail superintendent also dismissed the possibility of people going missing from within the jail premises, citing the surveillance by CCTV cameras. He mentioned that the entrance and exit of inmates are meticulously recorded in the registers.
However, he did not rule out the possibility of persons being taken into custody outside the jail premises if they are required in another case by the police.
Gigyani, who has filed a petition in the PHC on behalf of relatives of six inmates, said that if his clients have been arrested in any other cases, then they should have been produced before the magistrate within 24 hours of the arrest – “but none of them have been produced before any court”.
“The PHC has recently issued a detailed judgment in which it declared that if police arrest a person who is wanted in more than one FIR, then that person would be deemed arrested in all other cases,” he added.
Gigyani, in his petition, urged the court to take action against the jail authorities as the persons were forcibly disappeared with the collusion of the prison officials. “This is not a normal missing person case; the persons were not picked up from their houses or a market. They were released on court orders and were picked up from jail premises. That’s why we have prayed before the court to summon the recording of CCTV cameras installed within jail premises and on the adjacent roads installed by the safe city authorities. From that footage, it would be clear what time the CTD officials were present there and what they were doing,” he said.