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| Jail term ends, but Kutch man still in Pak jail |
| 18 January 2018 |
| Ismail Alimamad Samma (51), a resident of Nana Dinara village some 50km from the Indo-Pakistan border in Kutch, had gone missing since August 2008 after he strayed into the Pakistan side while grazing cattle, said Jatin Desai, national general secretary of Mumbai-based NGO, Pakistan-India Peoples' Forum for Peace and Democracy. Desai, who filed an RTI on this issue in August last year with the Ministry of External Affairs, recently received a reply to it from the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.
"Samma served five-year jail term on charges of espionage. His prison term ended in October 2016. But in a recent RTI reply we came to know that government of India has still not verified his identity despite him getting consular access in 2014. While case of Kulbhushan Jadhav is taken on priority, poor people like Samma are suffering because of government red-tapism," said Desai. Due to lack of nationality verification on the part of the MHA, he has not yet been repatriated, he added.
While Samma's family had been looking for him for several years, it recently learnt that he was lodged in a jail in Pakistan when a fellow villager, Mohammad Rafiq Suleman, returned from a Pakistan jail in October 2017. He told the family that he had seen Samma at a Karachi prison, said Desai.
Fazal Alimamad Samma, an activist of Khavda, said, "On knowing from Rafiq that Samma is alive we made a representation to Prime Minister, the Union home minister, external affairs minister and Kutch superintendent of police urging them to bring him back." Khavda police have been given the task to register the grievance of the family. PSI M K Chaudhary of Khavda police station said, "We have received the application of Sammabai."
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