ISLAMABAD: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Senator Farhatullah Babar has submitted a call-to-attention notice in the Senate regarding the alleged kidnapping of vice president of the Pak-Turk Schools and his family from Lahore late last month.
The notice, dated September 29, called Interior Affairs Minister Ahsan Iqbal’s attention towards a matter of grave and urgent public importance — the disappearance of Mesut Kacmaz, his wife and two daughters on September 27. He said that the abduction points towards the helplessness of state institutions in addressing the issue of missing persons.
He said that the style and manner of kidnapping bore the signatures of all too familiar kidnappings brazenly taking place in the country with alarming impunity. He added that this was the first time that a foreign national and his family had become victims of enforced disappearances.
The senator observed that the state cracked down on Pak-Turk schools, which Kacmaz was linked to, in the wake of the failed coup in Turkey and the Turkish staff of the schools was ordered to leave the country. He also stressed the need and urgency to draw the minister’s attention in order to challenge the possible narrative that the state might itself be involved in the kidnapping.
According to reports, former teachers of Pak-Turk schools have expressed serious concern over the recent kidnapping of their colleague from Lahore, demanding that the Turkish family be recovered immediately. Kacmaz was reportedly abducted along with his wife and two daughters from their residence in Wapda Town.
One of their neighbours, Fatih Avci, another Turkish national and schoolteacher, filed the application with the police. According to Acvi, he too had been abducted but was released a few hours later. He told the police that Kacmaz’s family had been staying in Pakistan on an asylum certificate of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) for a year after the Pakistan authorities directed the Turkish staff of the Pak-Turk Schools to leave the country in November last year.
Avci said that he had seen trained intruders in plain clothes taking Kacmaz, his wife and children into custody. They [the abductors] had first blindfolded and handcuffed Kacmaz and his family even after they resisted, Acvi said, adding that he had tried to step in but was meted out the same treatment.
The abductors then hauled him and Kacmaz’s family in their vehicles and took them somewhere, he said. However, he added that they released him after a few hours.
He told the police that he was unaware of the kidnapped family’s whereabouts.