PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Fifty-five Pakistanis were released from an Afghan jail and flown back to Pakistan yesterday after being held for up to six and a half years for fighting with the formerly Islamabad-backed Taleban.
A Pakistani C-130 military transport plane brought the returnees from Kabul to the northwestern city of Peshawar, marking the resumption of a stalled repatriation process under which the Afghan authorities have promised to release more prisoners in staggered phases.
Journalists were barred from meeting with the returnees, who arrived at an army base close to Peshawar airport and were taken straight to the city’s central prison for questioning, a local official said.
The aircraft had flown earlier from Islamabad to Kabul airport to collect the prisoners, who were brought by bus on to the tarmac under heavy guard by Afghan police and International Security Assistance Force troops.
As the prisoners, dressed in traditional long white robes called shalwar kameez, disembarked from the bus, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) officials checked their identities. One prisoner was seen walking on crutches.
Afghan government spokesman Omar Samad said the released prisoners had been held for between "one and six and a half years." "They were caught inside the country assisting the Taleban and Taleban-associated groups in the fight against Afghan resistance forces prior to Sept. 11," he told reporters at Kabul airport.
"The Afghan government has decided to release those Pakistani citizens who are deemed as not being a threat anymore to this country or any other country. They were not involved or are not known members of a terrorist organization or network such as Al-Qaeda, and not wanted by any other country," he added.
Another 55 prisoners would be released today, Samad said, while hundreds more still in provincial prisons would be released in phases "after verification that they were not terrorists." Samad urged the Pakistani government to screen the released prisoners on their return.
Thousands of Pakistanis, many of them young religious students from remote rural areas, flooded into Afghanistan to support the Taleban regime against a US-backed military coalition which routed the movement late last year. The US-led campaign was launched after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, blamed on the Al-Qaeda network, linked to the Taleban.
Estimates of the number of Pakistanis originally jailed range from 1,200, according to Pakistan’s Foreign Office, to 2,000, according to the Human Rights Commission. "These men had no links with Al-Qaeda and there was no justification for the (Kabul) authorities to keep them in prison," said Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, a religious affairs adviser in Pakistan’s Punjab provincial government.
Ashrafi estimated that at least 1,400 Pakistanis were still languishing in prisons across Afghanistan.
