After years of denials and coverups the agencies have had to confess they have been randomly picking up and torturing people. Another blow to the tyranny of those who treat their own people like haris.
:jhanda:
What the Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and comprising their lordships Faqir Khokhar, Javed Buttar, Nasir-ul-Mulk, and FayyazAhmed has done in the ‘missing persons’ case is unprecedented in our history. ISI and MI have been compelled to disgorge people held in illegal captivity whose existence was all along denied. How the mighty are shaken.
At a public meeting in Liaquat Bagh, Rawalpindi, a few months back, a mother of one such ‘missing person’, somehow managed to break the thick security around the president’s person and fell on her knees before him. Holding his hand and crying out loudly she pleaded for the release of her ‘missing’ son. Raising the woman to her feet, Musharraf resumed his speech and in a voice breaking with sincerity said that persons said to be ‘missing’ had most probably gone to wage ‘jihad’ with the Taliban. None was in military custody.
Their lordships, however, have been indefatigable and have shown what the agencies have been up to. This very week just to get three persons released from MI custody, their lordships had to sit for hours and hours listening to the most outrageous lies. Their perseverance paid off and after the director-general (DG) of the Federal Investigation Agency was told that if one such person, Hafiz Abdul Basit (whose arrest was traced to the DG), was not brought before the court, he (the DG) would have to spend time in jail, Basit and two other prisoners (all detained illegally, and mercilessly tortured during their detention) were released the next day.
I must have cried (yes, cried) half a dozen times as I read about the day’s proceedings in the Supreme Court. Such things have never happened in Pakistan before. To see dictatorship on the retreat, suffering one reverse after another, and freedom (or a pale version of it) on the march is a heady feeling. And the president and his men still think they can get the president ‘elected’ for another term from the present assemblies. What world are they living in?When Basit arrived at his home in Faisalabad, the people of his locality came out to welcome him and raised slogans in support of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, “friend of the poor” as they called him.