The mysterious disappearance of a Pakistani internee from Amritsar’s high-security prison appears all set to snowball into another row between Islamabad and New Delhi with jail officials clueless even four days after the 40-year-old mentally challenged man went missing.
Due for repatriation to Pakistan, Niyamat Ali’s absence was first noticed during the prisoner roll-call on Monday noon subsequent to which the jail authorities launched a massive hunt after informing the local deputy commissioner and police.
The long search for Niyamat Ali has now gone subterranean the scores of prison guards and sniffer dogs hunting for any sign of the man inside the complex maze of gutters and sewers underneath the sprawling 44 acre compound.
Convinced that the prisoner could possibly not have scaled the 20 to 28 feet outer walls of the jail, there is increasing concern that Ali could be trapped or have died due to thirst, hunger and exhaustion inside one of the sewers.
“Our men are smelling every sewer to see if there is any odour of a decomposing dead body,” Amritsar jail superintendent G.S. Sidhu told this newspaper on Thursday evening adding he has no plans to call off the search operation as yet.
But skeptics in Amritsar have even begun suggesting that “the whole search operation could well be a drama to cover up the custodial demise of the prisoner,” and that “the jailors were only awaiting an opportune moment to announce the discovery of the dead body.”
While the search for Niyamat Ali continues in Amritsar, there is rising concern about possible reactions in Pakistan and consequently the treatment of Indians imprisoned there.
Several Pakistan nationals, being held in India on separate charges, have died in custody in recent years.
In April 2008, Mohammad Akram passed away in Amritsar Jail. this was shortly after Khalid Mehmood, who had come across to witness an India-Pakistan cricket match in 2005 and was picked up on suspicion of being involved in espionage, died mysteriously in Haryana’s Bhondsi jail.
On both occasions, Pakistan had raised questions on the treatment being meted out to its citizens who ended up in Indian jails. Also, the Chandigarh-based World Human Rights Protection Council, which has helped repatriate scores of Pakistanis from Indian, had sought a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into every Pakistani death in Indian custody.