A flagrant disregard for post arrest procedure has been witnessed of late on Karachi. While a national problem rather than an exclusively provincial one, Sindh is trying very hard to make it one. The prime suspect in the DuaMangi kidnapping case, Zohaib Qureshi, has escaped with the aid of the Karachi police after two policemen took him to a shopping mall after a court appearance from where he simply walked out, got into a car and fled. A few weeks back, imprisoned convict Shahrukh Jatoi, who was involved in the 2012 murder case of Shahzeb Khan and sentenced to life imprisonment, was revealed to have been living comfortably in a private hospital in Karachi for several months. Additionally, PPP MPA Jam Awais, who is accused of torturing and murdering journalist Nazim Jokhio, was presented in court without handcuffs, a breach of protocol in such cases that the defense’s lawyer justified by arguing that it was “humiliating” for an elected chief of a tribe to be subjected to such treatment.
Either the Sindh government is simply unaware of what is going on in its jails or it is simply not bothered and is accepting such blatant violation of the province’s prison laws. Either way, a serious problem of well connected, moneyed and a politically influential individuals being able to shamelessly flout the law with impunity is quite evident. Taking notice of such incidents after the fact only adds to the problem as other inmates get ideas and try to execute them for their few months of luxury as well. That the practice is not only being endorsed but facilitated by the prison police is a bigger cause for concern as it points towards a cancer that may have spread too deeply into the correctional system to be effectively extractable. It is especially unfortunate that such a predicament was avoidable for the Sindh government had it identified and addressed the problem in a timely way, but rather opted to look the other way and allow it to exacerbate. A thorough cleanup of Sindh’s prison system is urgently required.
