UNITED KINGDOM/FILE: Amnesty release report detailing abductions of hundreds of people in Pakistan as part of war on terror

Pakistan has abducted hundreds of people as part of the U.S-led war on terror, often secretly holding them for months while they are interrogated, the human rights group Amnesty International said on Friday (September 29). Some suspects were held in Pakistani interrogation centres, but many were handed over to U.S. custody and held in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airbase or other secret detention facilities, the group said in a report on "enforced disappearances in the war on terror". In many cases, U.S. agents paid a bounty of 5,000 U.S. dollars (USD) to those, usually intelligence agents, who simply declared people terrorists, seized them and handed them over for interrogation with no legal process, Amnesty said. Amnesty researcher Timothy Parritt told Reuters television those accused of being terrorists were often detained without going through due judicial process. "There's a very broad net of people alleged to be terrorist suspects. Because the courts haven't examined the evidence against them there have been literally hundreds of people caught up in this net and one particular cause of concern was that the U.S. issued rewards or offers of rewards for so-called terrorist suspects, which because of the weak judicial system and concerns about police operations in Pakistan has led to a facilitation of these patterns of abuses, particularly arbitrary detention and disappearances." The rights group said the clandestine nature of the war on terror made it impossible to know exactly how many people had been forcibly 'disappeared' and tortured or illegally executed, but the number must run into hundreds. "Among the reports of these many hundreds of people arrested and detained in Pakistan, a substantial number have been transferred unlawfully out of Pakistan jurisdiction to U.S. and other agents and we know that some of these people arrested in Pakistan have been transferred first to Bagram in Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo," Parritt said. It cited Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan as saying in June this year that 500 terrorists had been killed and more than 1,000 arrested since 2001. Moazzim Begg, told Amnesty he was taken from his home in front of his wife and children and detained in Guantanamo. He said Pakistan had become a 'second player' alongside the United States in the 'war on terror', in its removal of human rights and civil liberties from suspects. "Pakistan has become, almost like a 'second player' in the 'war on terror' with the United States of America in how it removes the rights, removes any civil liberties, any freedoms that one would expect, by dragging people and kidnapping them from their homes. It is little wonder then, that people in Pakistan are afraid to speak about these issues because of the fear that they themselves may disappear." In another example, Amnesty said sisters Arifa and Saba Baloch and Arifa's mother-in-law Gul Hamdana were arrested in Swat in June 2005, but all state agents denied any knowledge of them. Hamdana was freed at a bus stop in Peshawar three months later but was too scared to talk about her experiences, and the two sisters were released in January 2006. No charges were laid. Amnesty said there had been reports that U.S. personnel had taken part in some of the arrests and had either been present at or had even taken part in the torture of some of the suspects. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is in Britain as part of a tour to promote his memoirs "In the Line of Fire". He gave a speech in Oxford later on Friday. His tour became controversial when he said in a U.S. television interview that a senior U.S. official had threatened to bomb his country back to the Stone Age unless he co-operated fully in the war on terror launched after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. targets. A leaked report from a group associated with Britain's Defence Ministry alleged earlier in the week that Pakistan's intelligence service ISI was indirectly supporting the Taliban rebels in Afghanistan and said Musharraf should resign. The Ministry of Defence distanced itself from the report.

ITN Source | September 30, 2006

Tags:. .torture. .sled. .rebels. .custody. .transferred