PESHAWAR: Former Peshawar district president of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf Zafarullah Khattak has said that the staff of Shaheed Gulfat Hussain police station here kept him and his friend in habeas corpus and manhandled them on the night between Saturday and Sunday without any criminal charge against them.

According to Mr Khattak, he and his friend Akhtar Mohammad were going in a car on GT Road near Hashtnagri around 11:00pm when additional SHO Irfan stopped them for checking.

“Despite showing our CNICs to the officer, he was adamant to take us to the police station for verification of the cards, where he confiscated our mobile phones and put us in the lock-up”, Mr Zafarullah told mediapersons at the police station on Sunday morning.

He alleged that the police station staff, including the additional SHO, constable Asif and wireless operator, maltreated and kept them in a lock-up for the whole night.

A number of PTI activists also gathered outside the police station in the morning and briefly blocked the Hashtnagri Road. They chanted slogans against the police and thana culture. They demanded that the entire staff of the police station should be suspended for arresting and teasing innocent people on various pretexts and extorting money from them in the police station. They said that if such influential people were tortured without any reason then what would be the fate of the poor.

In the meantime, SHO Waris Khan reached the police station and held a jirga with Mr Khattak and other PTI activists to pacify the family. He assured all possible cooperation to the aggrieved family and legal action against additional SHO Irfan, constable Asif and wireless operator for their misconduct.

When contacted, the police station muharrar said that they had just exchanged hot words and Mr Khattak had not done anything wrong. “A jirga has resolved the issue,” he said.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2014