Police free 50 children chained and tortured in Pakistan

Police in the Pakistani city of Karachi have rescued 54 students from the basement of an Islamic seminary, or madrassa, where they said they were kept in chains by clerics, beaten and barely fed.     

Police raided the Zakariya madrassa late on Monday on the outskirts of Karachi. They were now investigating whether it had any links to violent militant groups, which often recruit from hardline religious schools.

Most victims showed signs of severe torture, and had developed wounds from the chains, police said. The main cleric of the madrassa escaped during the raid.

“Those 50 boys were kept in such an environment like animals,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told journalists. Many of the students — who varied in age from 15 to 45 and were kept 30 to a room — were still in chains while shown on television. “I was there for 30 days and I did not see the sky or the sun even once,” Zainullah Khan, 21, said at a police station where the students were questioned and then released to their relatives.     

“I was whipped with a rubber belt and forced to beg for food.” Student Mohi-ud-Din said, “I was kept in the basement for the past month and was kept in chains. They also tortured me severely during this period. I was beaten with sticks.”

Senior police official Rao Anwar said many of those rescued were drug addicts brought to the seminary for treatment. “These people were not taken to the madrassa forcefully. In fact the parents of many of them had themselves got their children admitted there,” he said. “Some of them are drug addicts, and others involved in other crimes, and they were tortured and kept in chains so that they did not run away.”

Many people are too poor to afford non-religious schools or feel state institutions are inadequate so they send their children to madrassas, where they memorise the Koran, learn Arabic and study Islam. Many madrassas offer free boarding and lodging.