An Indian worker here has appealed to the Pakistan government to release his father who has been languishing in a Pakistan jail for 36 years. V.K. Abdul Latheef, 38, who works in Dammam, was 18 months old when his father left their home in the southern state of Kerala to seek work in the Gulf.
Latheef told Arab News that his father Vellakkattu Veettil Hamza, from Thennala, Tirurangadi Taluk in the Malappuram District, was one of 35 people on a boat arrested by the Pakistan Coast Guard in the Arabian Sea.
He appealed to newly elected Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to help the desperate families get their relatives back home.
The family includes the imprisoned man’s wife Nechiyil Pathumma and their other children Abdul Salam, who was just over 2 years old when his father left, and daughter Rabiya, who is married with four daughters. Rabiya had not been born yet when her father left. Latheef said the family does not have a photograph of their father. The one photograph they did have, from a railway season pass, was lost by a studio that was meant to restore it.
He said that he had initially heard that his father was working at a shop in Mumbai. But later Kerala media had published a story quoting a Keralite living in Karachi that he had seen a man named C.V. Mammootty from Kannur, one of the arrested men, in a Pakistani jail. Mammootty had said that the other arrested people were also in the jail with him.
The 35 people had sailed from Mumbai’s Wasayi port over 36 years ago.
Pakistan urged to release Indian father jailed for 36 years
