LAHORE: While the issue of missing persons is discussed primarily in the context of Balochistan, 116 people from Punjab are yet to be traced. This is despite the fact that cases have been registered and joint investigation teams (JITs) formed on the matter by a commission at the national level.

However, 53 people have returned home or have been recovered and 13 others have been traced, police records show.

The families of the persons still missing frequently point fingers at the intelligence agencies; they have moved courts or have applied for the registration of kidnapping cases through the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances. Regular appearances in meetings of the JIT and the commission have produced limited results, though.

Meanwhile, few police officers are willing to discuss the topic. One who did comment spoke of a “trust deficit” between military intelligence agencies and the police.

Police statistics available with Dawn show that of the 286 persons reported missing in Punjab between 2006 and 2013, 64 fall in the category of those whose cases are under investigation. The JITs have so far not come up with any specific opinion about their absence.

Twenty-six cases have been identified as possible instances of ‘enforced disappearance’ and a similar number of people are believed to be missing but there are no suspicions of kidnapping.

For various reasons, the commission deleted 15 names from its search-list. Five people are incarcerated in the Adiyala and Kot Lakhpat jails in the province, and 11 others have been arrested in different cases.

Four of the persons on the ‘missing’ list are now dead. The official record does not specify the locations where the bodies were found or how they died. There are several cases of kidnapping over personal enmity.

As many as 63 cases of missing persons have been reported from the Lahore district. Of them, seven people have returned home and the same number are categorised as missing but not picked up or kidnapped. Four cases have been deleted by the commission and three people have been traced, with one person located in the Kot Lakhpat Central Jail. The bodies of two persons missing from the Lahore district have been recovered.

There are 39 pending cases about which the JITs have not reached a conclusion.

Sources in the law-enforcement agencies told Dawn that up to 90 missing persons, out of the total 286 who fall in the categories of both enforced disappearance and those about which the JITs have not formed a specific opinion, were those who were in ‘custody’ of the intelligence agencies for debriefing regarding suspected connections with militant organisations or a direct/indirect role in sectarianism and terrorism.

They claimed that most of these had directly or indirectly helped militant groups in carrying out different acts of terrorism in the province. Agencies did not bring them before courts, they said, because it was believed that a trial might not produce results.

According to an official, monthly meetings of the JITs — each comprising officers from the ISI, Military Intelligence, Investigation Bureau, Special Branch and the Counter-Terrorism Department, as well as a police investigation officer — are held in each district in the presence of complainants to discuss the status of missing persons.

“A lack of coordination and the absence of a working relationship between the police and military intelligence agencies cause considerable delay in the resolution of missing persons’ cases,” the official says. “The police cannot disclose the whereabouts of persons held by army intelligence networks.”

Another official says that minutes of meetings of the JITs, which are headed by the district police chief, are recorded for later presentation in the commissions’ meetings; repeated meetings sometimes help in tracing missing persons.

Before the formation of the two-member commission and JITs subsequent to the intervention of former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, enforced disappearances were rampant, the official adds, explaining that the JITs usually take up the matter of a missing person to discuss three major possibilities: has the person vanished of his own volition, has he been abducted for personal enmity or for ransom, or has he been picked up by army personnel.

The families of a couple of missing persons Dawn talked to, however, blame the government and intelligence agencies for not being able to break terrorist networks and for picking up innocent people.

“My brothers Yasir Saleem and Usman Saleem did nothing wrong,” says Tahir Saleem of Hospital Street, Samanabad Morr.

Tahir says his two younger brothers and their three friends, Hafiz Hamid Farooq, Hafiz Sajjad and Sohail Majeed, were picked up from a house in Gulgasht Colony in Lahore on Feb 7, 2012. The raiders also took away Waqas, the son of the owner of the house, but threw him out of a car in a Lahore area some 22 days later.

He says that some of the raiders were in plainclothes but they were flanked by personnel of the Elite police force, and quotes the area station house officer, Sharif Sandhu, as telling him that the youngsters were being taken to the police station for questioning, and that they would be allowed to go in half an hour. That half an hour has now expanded to almost two years.

On the intervention of the court a kidnapping case was registered against unidentified officials a week after the incident, Tahir says. He has appeared in a few meetings of the JITs and the commission “but to no avail”.

Waqas, who was set free after three weeks, recalls that the drive lasted about 25 minutes and that they were taken for interrogation to a large hall with small rooms attached to it.

Tahir claims his brother Yasir, a father of three, worked as a technician in a company that sells cellphones, while Usman dealt in the butter business.

“They were never involved in any anti-state activity,” Tahir maintains. “I demand of the government to produce my brothers in a court. I demand a fair trial; we still do not know what the allegations against them are.”