Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) member Sara Belal on Tuesday demanded the government to have Pakistanis released from the Bagram Prison in Afghanistan. JPP which is affiliated with Reprieve, the international organisation for human rights legal aid, held a press conference at the Lahore Press Club. Sara said, “To date we have not been able to even ascertain how many Pakistanis are present within its confines, but we have a rough figure between 25 to 30 people who have been illegally picked up and detained.” At present, the JPP is fighting cases for seven prisoners in total, three of whom have already been cleared by the American Government but have still not returned to their country.
Sara said that the Pakistani government, especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was not making enough effort to ask for the release of their countrymen. “We would go to the extent of saying that the government has been involved in the knowledge of these persons being picked up. Not all of them have been picked up from the border areas. One of them was in Karachi too,” says Belal. “The least they can do is get them back now.”
