ISLAMABAD:
Mudassir Khan, a man who went missing from Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) in March 2024, is a prisoner facing trial in a military court, authorities told the capital’s high court on Friday.
On Tuesday, December 24, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) directed the Director General of Military Intelligence (MI) to submit a report on Khan’s whereabouts, while hearing a petition filed by his wife Nazima Fatehyab through her lawyer Imaan Mazari.
Brigadier Falak Naz, appearing before the court on behalf of the Ministry of Defence, on Friday submitted the report to the single-member court comprising Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani on the missing person. The deputy attorney general appeared on behalf of the federal government.
According to the report, Mudassir Khan has been located. He is in preventive detention and his case is being examined in a military court.
During the hearing, the petitioner’s lawyer Imaan Mazari requested the court to allow Khan’s family to meet the accused.
The court ordered the representative of the Ministry of Defense to facilitate the meeting in accordance with the law and then adjourned the hearing.
At the last hearing, the IHC questioned the usefulness of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, which, the judge noted, does not fulfill its functions nor does it allow others to do so.
“What’s the point of a non-functioning commission? It should be closed. If the commission was functioning, why would the petitioner have to go to court?” he asked
During the hearing, the deputy attorney general informed the court that Khan had gone missing from Muzaffarabad, the capital of AJK, and that an FIR had been registered there.
The court asked whether another army, another intelligence service (ISI) and another MI were operating in AJK.
Mazari had informed the court that on November 18, the petitioner received a call from an unknown number. “The caller, claiming to be the petitioner’s husband, said he was in the custody of an agency.”
He referred to the case of Kashmiri poet Ahmed Farhad, who also disappeared in Islamabad and was later located in a police station in AJK after the court’s intervention.
He said Farhad’s wife had also conveyed a message to him over phone that if she withdrew her petition filed in the IHC, her husband would return home within a few days.
