Tihar Pak prisoners don’t want to return

NEW DELHI: A team of visiting Pakistani judges, part of the eight-member Indo-Pak judicial committee on seeking release of each other’s civilian prisoners, faced a peculiar situation at Tihar Jail on Tuesday.

As the team was preparing possible release cases, 36 of the 69 Pakistani prisoners refused to be deported back to their country.

The prisoners belonging to the Gohar Shahi sect were refused asylum by India last year, after which they burnt their Pakistani passports and were jailed. The prisoners say conditions in Pakistan are not conducive to their stay, sources close to the judges committee revealed.

The four-member Pakistan delegation found no signs of Pakistani prisoners being tortured in Indian jails. “We found no signs of prisoners’ torture during our visits to Tihar and Amritsar jails,” justice Nazir Ahmed Zahid said.

The team had visited Amritsar Jail on Monday where 54 Pakistani citizens are lodged. It conducted on-the-spot verification of the antecedents of 12 prisoners for processing their cases for immediate release, a spokesman for the delegation said.

The committee recommended the immediate release of a woman prisoner and her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. The woman was pregnant when arrested by the Indian authorities on crossing the Indo-Pak border. She delivered the baby in jail.

To its horror, the judges committee discovered that 16 of the prisoners in the jail had lost their mental balance.