Pakistan has abducted hundreds of people as part of the U.S-led war on terror, often secretly holding them for months while they are interrogated, the human rights group Amnesty International said on Friday.
Some suspects were held in Pakistani interrogation centers, but many were handed over to U.S. custody and held in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airbase or other secret detention facilities, the group said in a report on “enforced disappearances in the war on terror”.
In many cases, U.S. agents paid a bounty of $5,000 to those, usually intelligence agents, who simply declared people terrorists, seized them and handed them over for interrogation with no legal process, Amnesty said.
“Enforced disappearances were almost unheard of in Pakistan before the start of the U.S-led war on terror — now they are a growing phenomenon, spreading beyond terror suspects,” Amnesty researcher Angelika Pathak said.
“The Pakistani government must set up a central register of detainees and publish regular lists of all recognized places of detention so that in future nobody can be secretly imprisoned and face the risks of torture,” she added.
The rights group said the clandestine nature of the war on terror made it impossible to know exactly how many people had been forcibly ‘disappeared’ and tortured or illegally executed, but the number must run into hundreds.
reuters.com