Indian national Hamid Nihal Ansari who has been languishing in a Pakistani jail since 2012 will be released and deported to India tomorrow. Ansari will return to India through the Wagah Border crossing in Punjab.
33-year-old Ansari is from Mumbai and has been under Pakistani custody since 2012 when he was arrested for illegally entering the country from Afghanistan. Ansari reportedly went to Pakistan in order to meet a girl he had met on social media.
The girl reportedly stayed in Kohat in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
In December 2015, a military court in Pakistan sentenced Hamid Ansari to three years in prison after convicting him for possessing a fake Pakistani identification. Since then, Ansari has been lodged at the Peshawar Central Jail in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
There, he was attacked multiple times by fellow jail inmates. In August 2016, Ansari’s lawyer told the Peshawar High Court that his client had been attacked by fellow prisoners at least three times over the course of a few months.
Ansari’s jail term came to an end on December 15, 2018. However, days before his jail term ended, there was no clarity on when — and if — Ansari would be released from prison and sent back to India.
On December 14, the Peshawar High Court heard the matter. Ansari’s lawyer Qazi Muhammad Anwar, told the court that his client’s prison term was to end on December 15 and that he should be released on the morning of December 16.
However, Anwar told the court, the Pakistani Ministry of Interior and prison authorities were completely silent about Hamid Ansari’s release and deportation to India.
The Pakistani government in turn told the high court that the process to deport Ansari would take a while since the relevant documents were not ready.
Following this the Peshawar High Court set a one-month deadline for the Pakistan government to release and deport Hamid Ansari.
However, that seems to have happened much earlier with the Pakistani authorities set to release Ansari tomorrow.
Dr Mohammad Faisal, the spokesperson of Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) tweeted, “Hamid Ansari, an Indian spy who had illegally entered Pakistan and was involved in anti-state crimes and forging documents, is being released upon completion of his sentence and is being repatriated to India.”
Ansari will be released from jail tomorrow and then will be taken to the Wagah-Attari Border crossing, where he will be handed to Indian authorities.
The decision to release and deport Hamid Ansari comes days after New Delhi issued a note verbale to the Pakistan High Commission in India, asking it to make necessary arrangements for the “earliest” release of Indian prisoners who have either completed their sentence or have been identified as Indian nationals lodged in Pakistani prisons.
