From finding love, to being taken by spies: Case of missing Indian in Pakistan

An Indian national, who went missing in Pakistan’s restive northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in 2012, was taken away by intelligence agencies from a police station before his disappearance, police has said.

The police officials on Tuesday told the Peshawar high court that the Indian national was taken away by personnel of intelligence agencies from a police station before his disappearance in Kohat district in the province.

The Indian national spent some time at a hotel in the city before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The Dawn reported that during the hearing into the case, investigation officer Sajjad Khan of the Kohat police told a bench of Chief Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel and Justice Ikramullah Khan that the police’s Riders Squad had arrested Nehal Hamid Ansari, 28, in the city and shifted him to the Kohat Development Authority police station for interrogation.

He said the arrest was made on the information provided by Intelligence Bureau inspector Naeem Khan. The officer told court that according to the SHO of the said police station, Faizullah Khan, intelligence agencies took the Indian national away after the police quizzed him and that his whereabouts had not been known since.

The court then issued directions to the said SHO, who currently serves in Hangu district, to show up along with the relevant record on October 29 to inform it about the whereabouts of the missing Indian national.

The Indian national’s mother, Fauzia Ansari, had filed a petition and a police station in Karak had registered an FIR on the missing person’s disappearance. However, another FIR on it was registered by the KDA police station afterwards.

When the bench began hearing into the case on Tuesday, lawyer for the petitioner, Shakil Asif, produced a joint investigation team’s report on the missing Indian national.

He said according to the JIT, Nehal Hamid Ansari had gone to Kohat on November 14, 2012 and booked a room in a hotel on what later turned out to be a forged national identity card. He said the hotel owner claimed the guy later stepped out and didn’t return. “The hotel owner insisted the SHO of the KDA police station came to him at midnight on that day and gave him the keys of the guy’s room saying he’s an Indian citizen, whose real name was Nehal Hamid Ansari,” he said.

He said his client wanted to know who had persuaded her son to visit Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he had gone to find a job, and who had made his fake Pakistani identity card. He said under Article 4 of the Constitution, Pakistani laws were applicable to the missing Indian national and therefore, he should be dealt with under the law of the land.

Ansari’s mother said her son first went to Afghanistan in November 2012 in search of aviation job and then entered Pakistan to help a Kohat girl in distress. He came in contact

with the girl on Facebook, a social networking site. The petitioner had earlier sent an application for relief to the Human Rights Cell of the Supreme Court, which had forwarded it to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances in March 2014.

On April 10, the commission directed the provincial home department to form a JIT to trace him. 

Image: Nehal Hamid Ansari went missing in 2012. Photograph: Ansari's Facebook page.